Creatures
Technology and Research
Creatures have always been a key part of Framestore’s DNA, with over 90% of the films we work on demanding believable, photoreal creatures brimming with personality. Our custom rigging, grooming and simulation technology are key components in this process.
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 pockets that knit each creature together.
Fibre
Fibre is the highly optimised PDB-based groom dynamics solver Fibre 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.
