This talk focuses on how we build our character rigs to improve graph performance, including changes to workflows and strategies required by our transition from serial to parallel graph structures. Because our animation software engine is the first in the…
Continue Reading→We present an overview of the Academy Award winning Facial Animation System utilized by DreamWorks animation in most of its movies since 1997 from Antz and Shrek to Mr Peabody & Sherman. The presentation will cover the concept utilized and…
Continue Reading→We present an importance sampling method for a bidirectional scattering distribution function (bsdf) for cloth, based on the microcyliner based appearance model for cloth rendering presented in [Sadeghi et al. 2013]. Our algorithm is efficient, easy to implement and it…
Continue Reading→In DreamWorks Animation’s Mr. Peabody & Sherman, our titular duo travel back in time through magical wormholes (Fig. 2). We needed a system that creates intricate and ethereal wormhole tunnels, which were inspired by the mathematical fractal flame images [Draves…
Continue Reading→During production of How To Train Your Dragon 2 we were motivated to improve our technology for character effects such as ropes, chains and cloth. Our goal was to reduce artist iteration time for simulation work while retaining the flexibility…
Continue Reading→In this book, developers from DreamWorks and other companies provide practical advice on multithreading techniques and visual effects used in popular visual effects libraries, tools and proprietary animation systems. Concrete examples show how multithreading paradigms are applied to achieve high…
Continue Reading→We present a fast and robust narrow-phase continuous collision detection (CCD) method. Our algorithm is based on the method originally proposed by [Provot 1997]. However, the traditional method has been reformulated analytically so as to obtain more robust collision detection…
Continue Reading→We present a fast and flexible technique for creating hair styles directly from modeled geometry by advecting streamlines in sparse high-resolution velocity fields derived from the surfaces or curves. Typically artists model hair styles as polygonal surfaces or curves representing…
Continue Reading→We have developed a novel hierarchical data structure for the efficient representation of sparse, time-varying volumetric data discretized on a 3D grid. Our “VDB”, so named because it is a Volumetric, Dynamic grid that shares several characteristics with B+trees, exploits…
Continue Reading→In DreamWorks Animation’s Rise of the Guardians Jack Frost has the ability to cover objects in swirling, magical frost. The frost is an extension of Jack’s character and its performance and appearance a direct reflection of his mood. We needed…
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