Creatures

While observation, intuition and keenly-honed artistic sensibilities are key to the success of our animation, they are only part of the story. Tech, R&D and an inquisitive, innovative, boundary-pushing spirit drive our work and twine seamlessly with our creativity, which means our custom rigging, groom and simulation technology play a huge part in our success.

The Invisible Art

Our artists explore the art of animation and how we breathe life into creatures & characters at Framestore.

A boy is stroking the beak of a mythical creature with a birds head and horses body, they are in a warmly lit forest.

Our rigging teams craft thousands of photoreal characters every year, from digital humans and photoreal animals to the weirdest, wildest creatures the imagination can conjure. Our riggers rely on a unique proprietary platform that allows for this wide stylistic breadth, but maintains precise artistic control of the bones, muscles and fat that knit each creature together.

Fibre

Fibre is the highly optimised PDB-based groom dynamics solver we use in-house to simulate hair, fur, feathers and foliage across tens of thousands of shots every year. Forming part of a largely automated pipeline, this allows our talented CFX artists to focus on look development rather than manually tweaking simulations.

With Fibre we have been able to reduce manual post-sim fixing by 80% and reduced the simulation time for fur and feathers by up to 50% and 80%, respectively.

Carl Bianco

Head of Creature FX

Hairfilters

Once a creature’s anatomy has been established, Framestore's proprietary grooming tool suite Hairfilters is used to add hair, fur or feathers. Hairfilters has continuously evolved over the past 15 years and is now closely integrated into our simulation and rigging pipeline, allowing us to deliver a large volume of highly complex creatures across a wide range of visual looks.