Paddington is no ordinary bear, nor does he look like the typical teddy bear. Anyone who knows Paddington has a good idea of what he looks like. Floppy hat, duffle coat, button eyes - details you might have variously picked up from Peggy Fortnum's original illustrations, the BBC's stop-motion animation, or the rows of wellington-booted cuddly bears that stand in toys shops.
Despite the many looks the anthropomorphised bear has had since his creation by Michael Bond in 1958, Paddington has never had to look real, or interact with real human characters. That is, until Heyday Films and Director Paul King decided on a film adaption of the famous books. And that's where Framestore (www.framestore.com) entered the picture.
It was challenging taking on such an iconic character, says Andy Kind, Framestore's visual effects supervisor on the film. There are a lot of looks for Paddington, and everyone has their favorite, so we spent a lot of time on the design before we found something that hit the mark.
The film tells the story of Paddington, the polite bear from Peru who is invited home by the Brown family after finding the creature in London's Paddington Station.
The live action was shot at Elstree Studios and on location in London as well as Costa Rica for the jungle scenes. During the shoot, the VFX team back at Framestore was hard at work perfecting the look of Paddington. There was a lot of responsibility finding a photorealistic design for a bear that people have so clear in their minds, says Animation Supervisor Pablo Grillo.
According to Grillo, the group was keen to bring him into the real world so he would sit into the live action and, they hoped, people would connect with him. Being anatomically correct meant we needed more detail compared with the simplicity of the original designs, which often had just two dots for eyes, he explains. We had to think about things like his wet nose, teeth, and muzzle, but still make sure that what we created carried that simple essence of the original Paddington.
King briefed the animation team on who Paddington was before they started work, focusing on every nuance of his personality. We tried to maintain this spirit in the way we crafted the performance. The hope was that rather than filling every moment with movement and unnecessary detail, you could just run a little wind through the fur to keep him alive and really hold some quiet moments, says Grillo. In contrast, we have his reactions to some of the more silly situations - to water, to marmalade, and to the various conditions he's put in. A lot of the humor of Paddington is watching him being put through the ringer.
Fur Real
Furry creatures arent new in VFX, of course, but when they are the stars of the show, you know you need to be top of your game. For digital fur, Framestore uses a proprietary hair system, fcHairFilters, which was originally developed for the polar bears in The Golden Compass back in 2007. At its heart, it's a node-based evaluation framework where nodes (filters) can be connected arbitrarily to form a directed acyclic graph where the hair data flows along the edges and gets manipulated by the nodes. In addition to hair or feather data, the nodes can also receive other data, such as geometry or functions, which change filter parameters on a per-hair basis.
The system has been developed continuously since 2007, and for last year's crop of hairy movies, Framestore introduced a fourth major version, which substantially sped up the grooming process.
The improvements enable the artists to decouple memory requirements from the actual number of hairs in the groom, and a groom can be computed with a small memory footprint that is independent of the total size of the groom. Other changes have included refinements to sharing memory between filters and improvements to allow multiple artists to work on the same character.
One challenge during the creation of the fur effects on Paddington was the many interactions of fur with other objects that are in contact with Paddington or the other bears (including, in one sequence, Sellotape). To handle all of these shots efficiently, the crew extended their tool set so they could generate data directly inside the fur system and then pass it along to other software packages.
Typically, image maps are passed into the fur system to control certain aspects of the fur, but now it is also possible to write hair attributes back into a map and then use that map outside the fur system, such as for influencing simulations. Another new feature is the ability to create particles on hair, which can then carry data from its parent hair out of the system. Such particles can serve as locators for instancing geometry (bread crumbs, twigs, leaves), they can serve as starting positions for droplets inside fluid simulations (including the shower in the movie), or they can be used as indicators where a particular part of the hair actually is on a certain frame.
Framestore also expanded its set of tools to allow TDs to do final finishing touches to parts of a groom, as it can always happen that the simulated hair doesnt exactly behave the way it is supposed to and the shot still requires some manual intervention. As a result, a quick way to select the offending hair and some means to change it locally are necessary. Besides simply using the same tools a groomer would use, it is also possible to make the hair visible to Autodesk's Maya and then apply Maya tools, such as a deformer.
After grooming a furry character, the groom data is brought into fDynamoHair, Framestore's in-house fur-simulation tool. The studio has substantially updated fDynamoHair over the previous year, devoting considerable time to improving how the artists detect and resolve collisions, and how the simulator takes advantage of mult
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Paddington is no ordinary bear, nor does he look like the typical teddy bear. Anyone who knows Paddington has a good idea of what he looks like. Floppy hat, duffle coat, button eyes - details you might have variously picked up from Peggy Fortnum's original illustrations, the BBC's stop-motion animation, or the rows of wellington-booted cuddly bears that stand in toys shops. 
