F. Sebastian Grassia

Most Recent Affiliation(s):

• Carnegie Mellon University, PhD Student

Other / Past Affiliation(s):

• Pixar Animation Studios

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Bio:

• SIGGRAPH 1999

  Sebastian Grassia studies Computer Science in the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University. Since first studying graphics at Williams College, where he graduated with highest honors in Computer Science and Physics, he has developed a deep fascination and appreciation for all varieties of animations, and the creative processes involved in their making. Focussing on 3D character animation, he has investigated intuitive algorithms for inverse kinematics on articulated figures, presenting some of his findings at previous SIGGRAPH courses. He is currently working on automatic character animation synthesis that is intelligent enough to create believable motion from high-level specification, yet flexible enough to allow fine-tuning by a trained animator. He hopes to achieve this goal by systematically encoding knowledge from animators so that it can be applied to guiding low-level motion transformation algorithms into combining and adapting existing animation clips. He has also studied new and existing representations of rotations for 3D animation, and has an upcoming article in the “Journal of Graphics Tools” on practical uses of the exponential map in animation algorithms. He learned about the animation process and architectures for supporting it while interning at Pixar in 1995, and has been active as an animation systems designer and consultant.  

   

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Course Organizer:

• SIGGRAPH 2019, "A Deep Dive Into Universal Scene Description and Hydra"