“Making Souls: Methods and a Pipeline for Volumetric Characters” by Coleman, Murphy, Kranzler and Gilbert
Conference:
Type:
Entry Number: 28
Title:
- Making Souls: Methods and a Pipeline for Volumetric Characters
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
The soul characters in Disney/Pixar’s Soul have a stylized appearance that sets them into a unique world, which introduced many new challenges. Everyone from the art department and character modelers and shaders to the technical directors and developers in the effects, lighting, and software groups collaborated to bring this new visual style to screen. The soul world is abstract and ethereal; this needed to be balanced with visual clarity and design appeal.
As our character rigging and animation tools use rigged surfaces, a key challenge was presenting a new representation derived from this data that meets our visual goals. To achieve softness of volumetric form and dynamically changing linework, we built a system to procedurally generate this data in Houdini. Significant numerical computation was required to create this data at the fidelity required. We developed an automated system for managing this computation in a configurable way, while keeping data for downstream renders in sync with changes to character performances.
References:
- Fong, J. Jarvers, M. Kranzler, and R. Michero. 2020. Finding the Look of Souls. In SIGGRAPH 2020 Talks. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2.
- Ouellet, D. Garcia, S. Gustafson, M. Kuruc, M. Lorenzen, G. Nguyen, and G. Gilbert. 2020. Rasterizing Volumes and Surfaces for Crowds on Soul. In SIGGRAPH 2020 Talks. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2.
Acknowledgements:
We thank George Nguyen, Junyi Ling, and Ling Tu for character development, Matt Kuruc and Elliott Cattell for pipeline development, and Boris Dalstein, Tolga Goktekin, and Fernando de Goes for silhouette software development
