Paper Info
Title
Mobilizing mocap, motion blending, and mayhem: rig interoperability for crowd simulation on Incredibles 2
Abstract
The stylized world of Incredibles 2 features large urban crowds both in everyday situations and in scenes of panicked mayhem. While Pixar's now academy award winning animation software, Presto, has allowed us to create expressive and nuanced rigs for our crowd characters, our proprietary approach has made it difficult to utilize animation from external sources, such as crowd simulations or from motion capture. In this talk, we discuss how we can automatically approximate our complex rigs with skinned skeletons, as well as how this has opened up our crowd pipeline to procedural look-ats, motion blending, ragdoll physics, and motion capture. In particular, the use of motion capture is novel for Pixar, and finding a way to integrate this workflow into our animator-centric pipeline and culture has been an ongoing effort. The system we designed allows us to capture motion data for multiple characters in the context of complex shots in Presto, and it facilitates choreography of nuanced and specifically timed crowd motions. Together with traditional hand animated motion cycles, our crowd choreography tools in Presto [Arumugam et al., 2013], and skeletal agent based simulation in SideFX's Houdini [SideFX, [n. d.]] via our MURE tools [Gustafson et al., 2016], the crowds team on Incredibles 2 produced rich scenes of busy streets and urban panic.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3214745.3214803
SIGGRAPH '18: Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Vancouver British Columbia Canada August, 2018
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
crowds,motion capture,rig simplification,pipeline
Conference
978-1-4503-5820-0
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
3
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Paul Kanyuk1124.95
Patrick Coleman2887.59
Jonah Laird300.34