Hair Grooming with Imageworks’ Fyber

ABSTRACT

Fyber is our new proprietary standalone grooming software solution for hair and fur on all current and upcoming film projects.

It was developed at Sony Picture Imageworks (SPI) to address the need for a faster, more interactive and more artist-friendly tool to generate any kind of hair, ranging from a characters head hair to fully furred animals, with the goal to significantly lower grooming times and an easier learning experience for new artists.

As a node based software, Fyber offers great flexibility to achieve any look an artist might desire while also providing fast visual feedback thanks to its highly multi-threaded computation graph and integrated OpenGL and Arnold viewports.

Fyber’s underlying engine is fully separated from its user interface which allows for a seamless and easy integration into 3rd party applications like Maya and Katana where it can be used to compute hair on the fly or to render it to their respective viewports.

It was first used for SPI’s work on Disney’s Mulan and has replaced our previous grooming solution on all shows ever since.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Graphics systems and interfaces