Evan Goldberg

Achieving real-time playback with production rigs

Rig speed is of paramount importance to animation pipelines. Real-time performance provides immediate feedback to artists thereby increasing the number of possible iterations and ultimately leading to higher quality animation. This paper presents a novel method for real-time playback of production rigs inside a host application, such as Maya, without sacrificing functionality or ease of use. Real-time performance is achieved by augmenting the host with Nitro, a replacement strategy for OpenGL drawing events, RigCache, a caching system for minimizing scene graph evaluations, and Parade, a distributed system for scheduling cache updates. Only minimal rig changes are required for the three tools to collectively optimize playback. The result is a seamless experience that is natural, unobtrusive, and preserves familiar work flows.

dRig: an artist-friendly, object-oriented approach to rig building

Ever increasing complexity and performance demands on animated characters in feature films necessitate unique rigging workflows and toolsets. We present dRig, a novel approach to rigging that allows for efficient reuse and extension of existing assets, fast authoring of per-element variations, and most importantly, accessibility of rig code to the entire department crew. By leveraging the powerful concepts of object-oriented programming and presenting it to the user through a well managed, artist-friendly interface, dRig provides a framework for sophisticated rig evolution and development.

Medial axis techniques for stereoscopic extraction

To perform the stereoscopic conversion of Disneys Beauty and the Beast, we developed novel extensions to standard medial axis techniques. Distance transforms, directional influences, and segmentation variations were used with medial axis skeletonization to automatically generate depth maps from the hand-drawn images. Overall, our methods significantly reduced the amount of manual rotoscoping and modeling traditionally required for a stereoscopic conversion process.

Flesh, flab, and fascia simulation on zootopia

We present the latest character simulation techniques developed for Disneys Zootopia. In this film, we created herds of anthropomorphic mammals whose art direction called for the subtle, detailed motion distinctive to the real animal world coupled with the stylized, non-physical aesthetics characteristic of animated feature films. This required a strong partnership between technology and production to productize our flesh simulation research to meet the unique challenges of this show. Our techniques scaled from several hero characters to many secondary and tertiary characters, and also accommodated two characters with special requirements.

Crowd character complexity on Big Hero 6

On Disneys Big Hero 6, we needed to create the city of San Fransokyo with unparalleled levels of visual complexity. The cityscape has more buildings and more geometry than any prior Disney film. Inhabiting this city are hundreds of unique characters, each performing a high caliber of animation individually and as a group. These challenges prompted a major upgrade to our existing crowd pipeline and the development of several new technologies in authoring crowd characters, generating crowd animation cycles, and instancing crowds for rendering.

Stereo compositing accelerated by quadtree structures in piecewise linear and curvilinear spaces

We present a new stereoscopic compositing technique that combines volumetric output from several stereo camera rigs. Unlike previous multi-rigging techniques, our approach does not require objects rendered with different stereo parameters to be clearly separable to prevent visual discontinuities. We accomplished that by casting not straight rays (aligned with a single viewing direction) but curved rays, and that results in a smooth blend between viewing parameters of the stereo rigs in the user-defined transition area. Our technique offers two alternative methods for defining shapes of the cast rays. The first method avoids depth distortion in the transition area by guaranteeing monotonic behavior of the stereoscopic disparity function while the second one provides a user with artistic control over the influence of each rig in the transition area. To ensure practical usability, we efficiently solve key performance issues in the ray-casting (e.g. locating cell-ray intersection and traversing rays within a cell) with a highly parallelizable quadtree-based spatial data structure, constructed in the parameterized curvilinear space, to match the shape definition of the cast rays.

Design and realization of stereoscopic 3D for Disney classics

The stereoscopic conversions of Disneys The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast required development of novel techniques to art direct, edit, and visualize 3D depth. Producing stereo without geometric models meant the creation of an extensive toolset to create and validate plausible depth for each pixel on screen.

The artistry of TechAnim: new cloth workflows on Big Hero 6

We present the latest cloth workflow advancements developed for Disneys Big Hero 6. These techniques allowed artists to achieve a high level of visual richness and artistic stylization through more naturalism in clothing design, more detail in garment construction, and more control over modeling and tessellation authorship.

State of animation tools in the industry

DreamWorks Animation, Pixar and Disney have invested in next-gen animation tools, or enhanced existing animation tools, for their animators. Autodesk has made a push in recent years to add and improve animation features in Maya. Rhythm and Hues built an extensible framework, Voodoo, that is used across multiple departments and received a 2013 Technical Achievement Academy Award.

Pixels to parks: new animation techniques for fantasyland

We present the innovative techniques that brought to life an audio-animatronic Lumiere for Disney World’s newest attraction-Enchanted Tales With Belle. Walt Disney Imagineering and Walt Disney Animation Studios collaborated to create a pipeline that was flexible and intuitive for feature film animators. First, motion was digitally choreographed on the computer with a virtual rig. Next, the software detected constraints and motion limitations that would exist on the physical audio-animatronic. This allowed the artist to resolve them and animate physically plausible motions. Finally, the performance was transferred to the audio-animatronic, faithfully recreating the artist-produced motion using motors and machinery.