FURTILITY AT WORK
MPC lead Groom artist Gabriel arnold outlines the operation of the studio’s Proprietary Grooming tool, furtility
Furtility is a GOP (Geometry Operator) based fur system with an interface that allows you to stack the operators and even nest them, which we do when clumping fur in levels.
When you create a fur system, by default there is a distributor node which allows you to distribute fur across a geometry. There is also a width GOP to set the root and tip width of the fur and a colour GOP to preview a root and tip colour. You can adjust how far up the curve the root width is used by adjusting the bias and offset values.
Almost all attributes can be adjusted using an in-house plugin we have for Maya called Paint. In Paint we can create canvases on the geometry and create channels to connect into whatever attribute we need to adjust. We also have an in-house procedural texture plugin called Texture3d which we can use for generating procedural maps such as noise maps, ramps and maths calculations for combining channels together.
For Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, we painted maps for the density of the fur, and then multiplied these with maps painted by the texturing department for the scars. We re-mapped to allow a small amount of fur to be created where the scars are, to make it look like the hair was slightly growing back at the edges. These maps were plugged into the density attribute on the distributor.
Other GOPS can then be made to shape the fur in the required way, and these include GOPS to deal with direction of the fur, the flow of fur around the shape of a geometry, guide curves for shaping the fur, clumping, and scraggly or wavy fur, plus GOPS for instancing to add things like dirt into the fur.