This talk presents DreamWorks’ Grasshopper, an environmental simulation system for creating believable motion for grass, plants, and other vegetation. The system was used extensively on the complex and expansive sets in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and…
Continue Reading→Hierarchy Models provide an encapsulation mechanism for joint hierarchies that yield an essential building block for procedural rigging. With Hierarchy Models, joints travel through dependency graphs (DGs) as an atomic entity. Operation nodes in the DG can modify all aspects…
Continue Reading→This talk presents DreamWorks’ Feather System Hummingbird, which is used for grooming body feathers and modeling scales interactively in real-time. It is also used for feather motion such as secondary motion or wind, for feather special effects such as ruffling or…
Continue Reading→The use of animation cycle multiplexing technique was first de-ployed on How to Train Your Dragon at DreamWorks to accomplish the ambitious task of animating many winged characters with limited resources. It has since been adopted through software platform changes,…
Continue Reading→Curves are traditionally used to represent assets such as fur and grass in CG. Applying noise fields to create procedural wind on curves has been an attractive method for its speed and variability. However, this makes the wind appear procedural,…
Continue Reading→DreamWorks’ fur simulation system Skunk is used to simulate fur on characters, garments, and props. Skunk’s ease of use, speed, stability, interactive nature, flexible framework, layered simulation approach, on the fly fur setup capabilities, consistency, and artist controls pushed boundaries of…
Continue Reading→Productions at DreamWorks starting with How To Train Your Dragon 3 will use Universal Scene Description (USD) [Pixar Animation Studios 2016] as the primary asset and shot representation across the production pipeline, from modeling to compositing. In this talk, we…
Continue Reading→In this talk we present a production workflow to generate panoramic high-resolution images for location-based entertainment and other semi-immersive visualization environments. Typically the display screens at these installations are an integral part of the surrounding architecture and have arbitrary non-planar…
Continue Reading→The Premo animation platform [Gong et al. 2014] developed by DreamWorks utilized LibEE v1 [Watt et al. 2012] for high performance graph evaluation. The animator experience required fast evaluation, but did not require fast authoring or editing of the graph.…
Continue Reading→Character rigs are procedural systems that compute the shape of an animated character for a given pose. They can be highly complex and must account for bulges, wrinkles, and other aspects of a character’s appearance. When comparing film-quality character rigs…
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