Fira Toolset

Production Innovation in Immersive Content

Aim

FIRA Toolset, developed by Oscar winning UK visual effects company Framestore, enables quality character asset and performance animation in real-time environments by creating an animation tool for immersive content.

Summary

A key factor stunting the projected growth of immersive content is the quality of character, creature and performance animation currently enabled by real-time engines. This challenge is immense, because in order to truly immerse the viewer, engaging narrative content must contain rich and nuanced facial expressions, body dynamics, gestures and other complex interactions, such as between a character’s skin and their clothing. FIRA Toolset aims to address this challenge.
FIRA (Fast Immersive Rigging and Animation) Toolset is a collaboration between Framestore – a world leading VFX, CGI and VR/immersive studio – and Weightshift – a physics based animation startup. It looks to increase the efficiency and quality of character and creature animation in traditional visual effects and in real-time engines through the use of physics based animation tools and the adoption of machine learning to reduce computational overhead.
The tool fits into current animation workflows and hardware to bring high quality film characters out of the domain of visual effects and into the real-time engines used in VR, games and immersive products. It can also decrease the timescale of production by over 50%.

Target Audience

Film and TV production and post-production
Gaming

Outcome

Framestore’s new tools are already being used on new and large-scale projects, including this year’s seasonal Hollywood blockbuster ‘A Boy Called Christmas’. The project partners aim to expand their reach in the film, TV, VR and Immersive sectors , to help improve the quality and capabilities of visual effects in creative media.