Blues Clues Conversion

Blue from Blues Clues using Ornatix hair system. Supplied by a contractor, heavy and error prone.

Blue from Blues Clues using Yeti hair system. Using my system for rebuilding it, lightweight, stable, and runs on our render farm.

Blue's Clues had begun production when I started at Noggin. The vendor created her using Redshift and Ornatrix. Once production ended, I was tasked with upgrading her to Yeti without altering her appearance.

In general, the use of Ornatix significantly complicated the workflow. Ornatrix's stack made modification and accessing attributes challenging. The hair required a large external alembic cache to keep the hair temporally stable. Due to the weight of the hair system, we were forced to do the animation to render rig swap technique.

When updating our Maya and Redshift, we decided it would be the perfect time to fix any issues we had with her rig. This created a fantastic challenge! The solution I found was to extract as many guides as possible from Ornatrix, out of the 74k guides, I found we needed only 10k. In Houdini, I created a system by which guide attributes could be extracted and rendered to disk as texture maps.

Texture maps

Blue custom data map for transferring styles between fur systems.

Guide Direction (aim)

Guide Length (len)

Guide Bend (bend)

These texture maps represented the curve's vector direction (aim), bend, and length. All are extracted by processing the curves with custom vex code. The final files could be plugged into a Yeti network to reproduce the Ornatrix look with negligible visual disparity. The biggest shift in look was updating our 5-year-old version of Redshift.

The final rig was animatable and didn't need swapping at render time. It was incredibly lightweight, with no viewport lag, and the renders ran quicker on the farm without such a heavy memory load.

CG Generalist | [email protected]