After Rythm and Hues did the pig lip syncs in Babe and Industrial Light & Magic created jungle book characters in Jumanji, ‘fur’ – the creation lifelike hair – remained the final frontier in cgi technology.

Now C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures – known for its cgi geese – has crunched out its own fur code for the Twentieth Century Fox feature Dr. Dolittle.

The r&d team headed by Bob Munroe developed a fur management code that can be plugged into Side Effects software. Fur Plug-In as it’s named, simplifies the hair geometry found in Side Effects’ Houdini package. The new software permits animators ‘to skip a step’ says c.o.r.e. vp John Mariella.

Rather than creating thousands of fur strands from scratch, a hair pattern is already established before it is rendered by the RenderMan program.

The market for modular software packages is modest. When Fur Plug-in hits the market via Internet and trade advertising, its target will be cgi companies that don’t have r&d departments of their own.

Mariella hopes their fur initiative will encourage other companies to bring their proprietary code out of the closet.

‘We’ve bought Hammerhead’s tracking software,’ says Mariella. ‘We hope there will be an increasing pool of little gems of software out there.’

Fur may also prove to be a litmus test for another of c.o.r.e.’s programs. While working on the Dimension Films/Miramax feature Mimic, Munroe developed a simplified lighting package.

‘The world of live action and the world of cgi are two different things when it comes to lighting,’ says Mariella. Problems arise when live-action directors call for specific lighting in the cgi effects, and animators literally translate their direction as color components in mathematical formulas.

The new program, designed in-house, allows animators to place a light on a digital scene and match it exactly to the live-action shot. The time to match shots is reduced and scenes are blended more naturally.

Munroe plans to patent his code before taking it to market. The lighting package can marry with other software packages.

Whereas c.o.r.e. is promoting itself by releasing proprietary software, TOPIX/Mad Dog has released a cloth plug-in program for Softimage on the Internet without charge. In one year, 7,000 people hit the site to download it.

‘The publicity we got for giving away the program for free is far greater than the money we could earn by selling it,’ says, Colin Withers, technical director at topix.

According to Withers, there is a lot of competition on the market already, so if you decide to sell software you have to build up an infrastructure to support it.

‘There are only 8,000 seats of SoftImage, so it’s not a large customer base to begin with,’ he says.

There are a number of competent fur and cloth packages already on the market, but the real magic remains in the hands of producers who are forced to produce their own packages to respond to creative demands.

topix/md recently programmed its own sparks and flames and a program for gelatinous liquid.

Despite the amount of coding going on in production houses, most are wary of marketing it. Today, the large cgi companies such as ilm and Pacific Data Images do not sell their proprietary software to the public.

Eric Armstrong, supervising animator at pdi, the cgi company working on Columbia Pictures’ cg mouse Stuart Little, developed its own fur package but will not market it.

‘They don’t want to sell their programs because they do not want to give their competitors any edge,’ says Withers.

Pixar is the exception to the rule, having released its software Renderman and MenX on the market in 1986/87. But even their rules have changed.

‘Today, if we had it would we put it out? That’s a very good question,’ says Bill Reeves, supervising technical director at Pixar. ‘We haven’t put out any new packages since then, only a few plug-ins,’ he says. ‘It’s not our focus these days.’