The unique, stylized look of Trolls World Tour presented complexity challenges to our rendering pipeline. Each asset was covered in high-density fuzz, with millions of curves processed each scene. We revisited the way we handle curve geometries with new opti-…
Continue Reading→The world of hair in DreamWorks’ film Trolls World Tour got much bigger than in the first film Trolls [3]. The distinct musical genre that each Troll tribe was devoted to, influenced their hair design and movement. The wide variety…
Continue Reading→A well-known artifact in production rendering from the use of shading normals is the shadow terminator problem: the abrupt interruption of the light’s smooth cosine falloff at geometric horizons. Recent publications introduced several ad-hoc techniques, based loosely on microfacet theory…
Continue Reading→The animated movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World introduces a new species of dragon in the franchise: the Deathgripper. This dragon possesses the ability to spit green acid that both dissolves and sets ablaze objects it touches.…
Continue Reading→Everest from Abominable is a main character with fur, he doesn’t talk, and is in over 650 shots. His huge size, abundance of fur, the fur’s emotional response, wide range of biped, quadraped and rolling motions, magical abilities, along with…
Continue Reading→This talk presents DreamWorks’ Termite, an environmental rigging and simulation utility used by the Character Effects Department (CFX) for rapidly creating simulation setups for environment assets without pipeline dependent complexity requirements or additional data carried by the geometry itself, such…
Continue Reading→By enabling artists to work interactively with renders of multiple shots from a single application, new lighting and surfacing work-flows were made possible. This technique was implemented by replacing Katana’s interactive-render mechanism, and by leveraging Arras, DreamWorks’ in-house cloud computation…
Continue Reading→An image-space hierarchy is introduced to reduce artifacts from prematurely stopping in adaptive sampling in a Monte Carlo ray tracing context, while maintaining good performance and fitting into an existing sampling architecture. Research Paper for A Dynamically-Updating Hierarchical Stopping Condition…
Continue Reading→The environments of How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World are immersed in waterfalls, from lush Nordic islands to mysterious, submerged kingdoms of lakes and crystals. Because of the variety and complexity of these sets (about 4000 waterfalls had…
Continue Reading→For How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, DreamWorks Animation made the decision to reuse the existing character assets from the preceding production, How to Train Your Dragon 2. Many resourceswere put into rigging the large quantity of characters…
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