fabrication
CG-groomed fur and silicone-cast creature fabrication
Puppet / Digital-to-physical puppet fabrication
Definition
A hybrid stop-motion fabrication technique in which a creature's fur is designed first as a digital CG groom -- a VFX hair/fur simulation built over the character's 3D model, the same kind of system used to fur a fully-digital creature -- and that digital groom is then used to guide silicone casting of real, physical fur onto the practical puppet, rather than hand-applying individual fibers or painting a fur texture onto the skin. LAIKA built the pipeline for Wildwood (2026) to fur "dozens of creatures across hero, background, and crowd roles" at a scale hand-application could not reach.
Overview
Furring a stop-motion puppet by hand -- cutting, dyeing and individually placing thousands of real feathers or fibers, as LAIKA did for Wildwood's golden-eagle puppet The General (see [[hair-materials]]) -- does not scale to a whole cast. Wildwood needed fur, not feathers, on "dozens of creatures across hero, background, and crowd roles," in the words of LAIKA groom artist Micah Henrie, presenting the studio's solution at SIGGRAPH Talks 2025. Rather than choosing between slow hand-application and a flat painted-on fur texture, LAIKA built a third route: design the fur digitally first, the way a fully-CG film would, and use that digital design to manufacture the puppet's actual physical coat.
The pipeline runs through the studio's VFX department rather than its traditional fabrication shop. VFX first supplies the creature's 3D model, then authors a digital "groom" over it -- a CG hair/fur system of the kind ordinarily used to simulate fur for on-screen digital doubles or fully animated creatures, specifying direction, length, density and flow across the character's body. Henrie's team then uses that digital groom, in his own words, to guide "CG-assisted silicone casting": the groomed pattern becomes manufacturing information for casting real, physical fur onto the practical puppet, in the same sense that a digital sculpt already serves as manufacturing information for a 3D-printed replacement face (see [[digital-to-physical-puppet-fabrication]]). The result, per Henrie, keeps "anisotropic characteristics" -- fur that catches and redirects light differently depending on viewing angle and brushing direction, the visual signature of groomed fur rather than a flat texture -- while still being a physical object an animator can pose frame by frame.
Henrie frames the payoff as scale and continuity together: the digital-groom-to-silicone-cast route let a comparatively small crew fur dozens of creatures for an "epic feature film," and it was built to keep practical and digital fur reading as one material by design ("enabling seamless integration between practical and digital elements") rather than as a visible seam between what the camera photographed and what VFX added afterward. That is consistent with Wildwood's broader, separately reported production approach of pairing practical stop-motion photography with digital enhancement for scale and movement beyond what is practical to build and shoot directly. Within one production, the choice of furring technique is therefore role-specific rather than uniform: The General's roughly 3,794 hand-applied real feathers for a single hero puppet sit alongside a CG-groom-to-silicone pipeline built specifically because dozens of other creatures could not receive the same hand treatment.
Workflow
- 1. VFX supplies or builds the creature's 3D model and authors a digital groom over it -- the same kind of CG hair/fur system used for a fully digital creature -- setting fur direction, length, density and flow.
- 2. The digital groom is used to guide silicone casting of physical fur onto the practical puppet, translating the groomed digital pattern into manufacturing information the way a digital sculpt already guides a 3D-printed part.
- 3. The cast-fur puppet is animated and photographed conventionally on the stage; the pipeline is designed so the resulting practical fur and any digital fur/VFX work added later read as one continuous material rather than a visible practical/digital seam.