Mica: A Photoreal Character for Spatial Computing

James Bancroft, Nafees Bin Zafar, Sean Comer, Takashi Kuribayashi, Jonathan Litt, Thomas Miller

Mica is an autonomous, photoreal human character that runs on the Magic Leap One spatial computing platform. The past ten years have seen tremendous improvements...

A Schur Complement Preconditioner for Scalable Parallel Fluid Simulation

Jieyu Chu, Nafees Bin Zafar, Xubo Yang

We present an algorithmically efficient and parallelized domain decomposition based approach to solving Poisson’s equation on irregular domains. Our technique employs the Schur complement method,...

Pyramid Coordinates for Deformation with Collision Handling

Gene Lin, Nafees Bin Zafar, Junze Zhou, Edwin Ng

We present an efficient implementation of the reconstruction of pyramid coordinates which are used for the deformation of animated characters. By reformulating the pyramid coordinates...

Rapid: An Artist Friendly Particle System

Devon Penney, Nafees Bin Zafar

A particle system is a heavily used tool in every effects animation department in the world. In this paper, we re-explore this well understood, and...

Elastic and Plastic Deformations with Rigid Body Dynamics

Jeff Budsberg, Nafees Bin Zafar, Mihai Alden

We present a fast and robust method of simulating flexible materials that offers significant advantages over existing methods. Our approach supports complex geometry (concave features,...

Cloud Modeling And Rendering for "Puss In Boots"

Brett Miller, Ken Museth, Devon Penney, Nafees Bin Zafar

The techniques and workflow used to create a very art-directed digital sky in the movie “Puss In Boots”. The story of DreamWorks Animation’s “Puss In...

End of Line: Character Destruction in "Tron: Legacy"

Atsushi Ikarashi, Eddie Smith, Ryo Sakaguchi, Brian Gazdik, Nafees Bin Zafar

This talk discusses how the derez effect in “Tron: Legacy” was created.

Production Volume Rendering

Magnus Wrenninge, Nafees Bin Zafar

This courses showed how to render non-homogenous media like clouds. The interesting thing about this course was the participation of 6 visual effects studios, and...

Destruction and Dynamics in Film and Game Production

Erwin Coumans, Michael Baker, Nafees Bin Zafar, Mark Carlson, Brice Criswell, Takahiro Harada, Phil Knight

This course focuses on film and game production practices in the area of rigid body and particle simulation and collision used in breaking objects and...

Destroying LA for "2012"

Nafees Bin Zafar, Dave Stephens, Marten Larsson, Ryo Sakaguchi, Michael Clive, Ram Sampath, Ken Museth, Dennis Blakey, Brian Gazdik, Robert Thomas

For the movie “2012”, Digital Domain was tasked with destroying its home city of Los Angeles… digitally. The destruction effects would be seen up close,...

Guiding of Smoke Animations Through Variational Coupling of Simulations at Different Resolutions

Michael B. Nielsen, Brian B. Christensen, Nafees Bin Zafar, Doug Roble, Ken Museth

We propose a novel approach to guiding of Eulerian-based smoke animations through coupling of simulations at different grid resolutions. Specifically we present a variational formulation...

Blobtacular: Surfacing Particle Systems in "Pirates of the Caribbean 3"

Ken Museth, Michael Clive, Nafees Bin Zafar

The core of this sketch was about generating smooth surfaces from low density particle based fluid simulation. The algorithm looked at the neighborhood of particles...

Scattered Spherical Harmonics Approximation for Accelerated Volume Rendering

Nafees Bin Zafar, Johan Akesson, Doug Roble, Ken Museth

This sketch demonstrates a method for lighting volumetric participating media with environment maps.

Cartesian Grid Fluid Simulation with Irregular Boundary Voxels

Doug Roble, Nafees Bin Zafar, Henrik Falt

This sketch presents a relatively simple way to deal with partially filled fluid voxels in a finite difference based fluid solver. Chris Batty’s variational approach...

DD::Fluid::Solver::SolverFire

Nafees Bin Zafar, Henrik Falt, Mir Zafar Ali, Chamberlain Fong

This paper describes an implementation of a fire simulation tool used by artists at Digital Domain. We discuss choices of computational techniques, practicalities of initiating...