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.

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 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.

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.