The VFX studio explains their tech to extend proprietary simulation and rigging tools to real-time workflows.
Framestore visual effects supervisor Theo Jones and machine learning engineer Leo Hills join Ian Failes from befores & afters to discuss the studio’s FIRA machine learning tech, used for the extension of proprietary simulation and rigging tools to real-time workflows.
This was tech that Framestore recently presented at DigiPro ’21, and their published paper is freely available to read in the ACM Digital Library. Here is the abstract:
Framestore has been producing award winning creature effects for over 20 years, with complex rigs and realistic animation being crucial elements of these creatures’ visual fidelity. The studio has a long history of building bespoke tools and technology. In this talk, we present FIRA, a machine learning based pipeline which allows for the extension of a largely proprietary stack of simulation and rigging tools into an emerging domain of realtime workflows. FIRA allows for fully simulated render resolution rigs to be used in previs and virtual production workflows and provides a portable, high performance representation of a VFX deformation rig that can easily be used in different DCCs and applications.
You can listen to the discussion at Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or directly in the player below. Also, here’s the RSS feed.
