AdonisFX: Four Workflows. One Framework.
How to choose the right AdonisFX workflow for your production.
AdonisFX: Four Workflows. One Framework.
How to choose the right AdonisFX workflow for your production.
Adonis is a framework designed to handle everything from background characters to primary hero characters. Creature simulation in AdonisFX is built around a layered stack: muscles, glue, fascia, fat, skin. Different character requirements dictate how much of that stack you build, how much automation you use when building it, and what you start building from. In this article we cover the core AdonisFX workflows of Turbo, Hybrid, Crafted, and Toon, along with guidance on when to use each one.
Turbo: A Working Rig in Minutes
If you have spent time with auto-rig systems in animation, the idea behind Turbo is immediately familiar. You provide the inputs (mummy geometry, muscles, sensors, fascia, fat, skin layers), drag them into the Turbo UI, press Apply, and the system builds the full simulation stack for you. Constraints are created, properties applied, sensors wired to each muscle, layers connected in sequence. Voila! A functional, multi-layer rig.
The result of Turbo isn’t meant to be final quality. The purpose is to give you something that moves, something you can show a supervisor to establish viability and buy time for refinement. Production often needs that intermediate proof of life before committing to a longer crafted build, and Turbo offers a credible starting point.
No scripting knowledge is required and the tool shelf provides everything through a visual interface. From there, the AdonisFX paint tools let you refine maps, adjust constraint behaviour, and push the setup incrementally toward a crafted quality result. Part 2 of the Turbo tutorial series covers exactly this: how to take the Turbo output and improve it systematically, layer by layer.
Best for: Showing something quickly. Maybe you are dealing with a non-hero creature that needs a functional rig without weeks of work, or you want a solid baseline to build from.
Hybrid: Simulation Without a Skeleton
Read the full Hybrid article →
The Hybrid workflow starts from what every animated character already has: a deforming skin from an animation rig. Adonis pushes that surface inward procedurally using the ADN push deformer to generate a fascia layer, then adds fat dynamics and skin sliding on top. No skeleton or muscles required, this is about adding simulation detail to a quality start point.
What that stack produces is tissue response: the belly lagging on a turn, muscles overshooting after a fast stop, fat settling after a landing. These are the details a deformation rig cannot generate because it moves the surface without anything underneath it. Hybrid allows you to quickly add that underlying dynamics layer, allowing you to upgrade characters without needing to completely rebuild a tissue system.
The workflow is designed to be additive. The head, paws, tail, and any area where the rigger has already built correctives and controls are cut from the simulation entirely. The rig underneath carries on doing exactly what it was built to do. The push multiplier controls where tissue sits thick and where it sits thin, and because it is paintable, those decisions are made per-character. Sliding constraints are painted with broad strokes and smoothed edges to define where skin moves over the tissue beneath.
Best for: Showing something quickly. Maybe you are dealing with a non-hero creature that needs a functional rig without weeks of work, or you want a solid baseline to build from.
Crafted: Full Anatomy, Full Control
Read the full Crafted article →
Crafted is the full anatomy workflow and the highest quality result AdonisFX can produce. If you have the time budgeted, the results are well worth the effort. Every muscle is placed manually, with origins, insertions, constraint properties, and painted maps defined individually. Each sensor is wired by hand. Every layer is tuned for the specific character and the specific performance it needs to deliver.
This takes time. Crafted is the workflow for when the character will be on screen long enough, and close enough to the camera, that every detail will be scrutinised. The Inbibo Hyena asset is a complete Crafted example, available to download for both Maya and Houdini, but it is a starting point for what the workflow can produce. The quality of the output scales with what you bring to it: more anatomically accurate muscle geometry, a more detailed mummy, and a higher resolution skin all feed through to the final result.
The payoff for that investment is complete control. Stiffness overrides, damping multipliers, and global controls exposed through ADN locators mean the rig can behave correctly in a slow walk, a fast run, and a rapid impact without manual re-simulation. An animator can adjust global muscle stiffness interactively during playback to judge the result in context, with no overnight cache required.
Best for: Showing something quickly. Maybe you are dealing with a non-hero creature that needs a functional rig without weeks of work, or you want a solid baseline to build from.
Toon: Stability Under Extreme Conditions
Using anatomical simulation on cartoon characters is counterintuitive by design. Anatomical solvers are built around expected joint ranges, realistic mass distributions, and near-incompressible tissue. A cartoon character rarely conforms to these limitations. Extreme squash and stretch, instant direction changes, smear frames, hyperextension: these are features, not errors, and most anatomical solvers treat them as failure conditions and blow up accordingly.
AdonisFX handles this differently because it solves iteratively: approaching a result over multiple passes, never forcing an exact answer, returning the best result it has if it has not fully converged. Under extreme conditions, this means the solver degrades gracefully, staying in the plausible range without locking up. It also solves each layer independently, which keeps individual pieces locally stable even when the overall pose is extreme or velocities are insanely high.
The practical result, demonstrated using the Beta character from Agora.community, is a simulation setup built in a matter of hours using Turbo as the starting point, which holds together through kung fu strikes, dancing, smear frames, and the kinds of poses that make conventional solvers fail. The skeleton is generated procedurally from the skin itself using the ADN push deformer, so there is no separate skeleton to model. Stiffness and damping are fully controllable during playback, giving animators the ability to dial behaviour per-shot without re-caching.
Best for: Adding secondary motion to a stylised or non-realistic character, the animation includes extreme poses or velocities, or you need a simulation setup that cooperates with the animator's intent.
Did you know? AdonisFX is designed to handle imperfect input geometry. Muscles can intersect, the mummy doesn't need to be flawless, and the solver will still produce good results. In production, anatomy is rarely perfect and time to clean it up is rarely available.
Choosing Between Them
The three main workflows sit on a spectrum from speed to control. Turbo gives you a functional multi-layer rig in minutes, Hybrid adds dynamics to an existing deformation rig without rebuilding it, and Crafted gives you the full anatomical setup that hero work requires. They are not mutually exclusive: a Turbo build is a reasonable starting point for a Crafted refinement pass, and the Hybrid approach shares techniques with both.
The Toon workflow is less a distinct position on that spectrum and more a demonstration that the same tools hold together under conditions they were not originally designed for.
If you want to try any of these approaches, the Inbibo Hyena asset is available to download for both Maya and Houdini. The tutorials for each workflow are on the Inbibo YouTube channel. For questions or to share your work, the community is on Discourse.
Try it for yourself
The best way to understand what AdonisFX can do is to use it. There's a free 30-day trial available for individual artists, and dedicated evaluation licenses for studios that need more time to assess it properly.
