“Metaball Madness – The Rigging Of An Implicit Surface Character” by Lykkegaard, Butts and Teo
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- Metaball Madness - The Rigging Of An Implicit Surface Character
Session/Category Title:
- Animating and Rendering Ooze
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Moderator(s):
Abstract:
We present a novel character rigging solution developed for OOOOO, a liquid supercomputer in Pixar’s Elio. OOOOO is Pixar’s first mesh-free character rig and is one of Pixar’s most unusual characters to date. The technical challenges presented by OOOOO’s design necessitated reimagining our conventional way of articulating characters. Rather than offloading the complexities of OOOOO’s desired movements to downstream departments, we developed a system that allowed our animators full fidelity control while ensuring downstream renderability. The system’s architecture supports a hierarchical arrangement of implicit surface primitives and operators, allowing for complex transformations while preserving the character’s desired liquid essence and offers unprecedented flexibility in character animation. This character is hence a rigged shader instead of a traditional mesh character. We approached the risk-taking and experimentation of a new approach (especially given its questionable renderability) by safeguarding and making sure a parallel and traditional mesh-based approach could be deployed. This strategy fostered a high bar of cross-departmental teamwork between artists, TD’s, research scientists and production leadership and OOOOO ended up being a significant highlight of successful collaboration!
References:
[1] Cat Luo, Trent Crow, Fernando De Goes, and Ferdi Scheepers. 2025. Metaball Madness: Look Development For A Shapeshifting, Implicit Surface Character On Pixar’s Elio. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 Talks. ACM, 2 pages.
