GVU / DVFX Special Talk
Title: Making Hair/Fur for the Movies (at Sony Pictures Imageworks)
Armin Bruderlin
Senior Software Engineer
Sony Pictures Imageworks (Culver City, California)
Location: TSRB 133-134
Time: 2pm - 3pm
Date: April 26, 2005
Abstract:
We have implemented a practical pipeline for the digital creation of hair and
fur which has been used in productions like "Stuart Little", "Stuart Little 2",
"Hollowman", "Harry Potter", "The ChubbChubbs", "Polar Express" and "Spiderman
2". It is currently being used in several shows, including "The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe" and "Open Season". Our approach combines geometrical,
animation and rendering techniques in order to provide a flexible, robust and
efficient method to generate realistic looking animal fur or human hair.
Rather than modeling tens of thousands of individual hairs, we define a
smaller number of "control" hairs from which the final dense fur coat or hair is
generated. The main calculations are divided up into determining the static
features (instancing) and the animated features (interpolating) of each final
hair. There also is a mechanism to model, animate and render several layers of
hair such as a furry under/overcoat, or a fuzz and main human hair layer.
We have been able to achieve convincing looks of dry and wet fur coats as well
as different styles of human hair.
Bio:
Armin Bruderlin is currently a senior software engineer at Sony Pictures
Imageworks in Culver City, California. Since joining in 1997, he has been
working in the software department while supporting the production of such
movies as "Spiderman 2", "Polar Express", "Cursed", "Stuart Little 2", "The
Chubb Chubbs", "The Hollow Man" and "Stuart Little".
Armin received a B.Sc. in Informatik from the Fachhochschule Furtwagen in
Germany, and an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver, Canada. Armin's interests in computer graphics include
all aspects of making believable computer animated characters.
