Awesome reel from Ben Kilgore http://www.benkilgore.com. I was reading on his website what he meant by creature engineering and I found the description. VFX is such complex field that there are always unknown parts of production but is always amazing to find artists like him.
Ben Kilgore Creature Engineering 2019 from ben kilgore on Vimeo.
"What's "creature engineering"? Do you mean rigging?
The most successful CG creatures involve four broadly overlapping disciplines:
- Rigging : The production of puppets of various types, driven by animation curves. These puppets may be realtime, or they may be slower, in order to provide more WYSIWYG feedback to stakeholders. They may involve animation controls and hence UX, however this isn't always the case.
- Creature Effects and Finaling : From static deformers to muscle, cloth, and hair simulations. This is where the artistry and realism happens, and is often the most expensive part of high end builds.
- Tooling and Pipeline : An array of work, from build schemas, to cutting edge MPM solver technology, to snippets of MEL used to organise shot options, to data wrangling backends designed to keep the creature factories pumping geometry through the system and into shots.
- Creature Supervision : Holistic creature-as-product; sculpting, lighting, surfacing, grooming, and the above three disciplines interwoven technologically and organisationally with motion (animation, performance capture, simulation, proceduralism) in order to produce the best possible overall results for clients. Producing the best CG is as much about relationships as it is technology and artistry, and this is where those relationships develop."
