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Premo: Powerful Character Rigging, Fast Animation
Stuart Bryson, Matthew C. Gong, Rob O'Neill, Ted Forgrave, Ben Kwa, Paul DiLorenzo
Overview of DreamWorks' Academy Award-winning Premo system featuring pose-centric sculpting workflows that map edits back to underlying pose shapes.
Abstract
Premo is an Academy Award-winning animation and rigging platform developed by DreamWorks that introduced native rigging support through a new data model. The system enables pose-centric workflows where artists can sculpt deformer output directly in any pose, mapping edits back to underlying pose shapes. Its dual graph representation allows full-resolution production rigs to be loaded editably while maintaining interactive animation performance, eliminating the need for build scripts before rigging.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / system overview (DreamWorks Premo rigging and animation platform)
- Contributions
- Demonstrates a new data model that gives Premo native rigging support
- Shows pose-centric workflows where artists sculpt deformer output in any pose and map edits back to underlying pose shapes
- Presents a dual graph that loads full-resolution production rigs editably while keeping interactive animation performance, removing pre-rigging build scripts
- Context
- Continues DreamWorks' in-house rigging/evaluation lineage following LibEE 2 (2018), an Academy Award-winning production platform.Builds on: LibEE 2: Enabling Fast Edits and Evaluation
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; the described workflows and performance are production-proven on DreamWorks' pipeline rather than independently benchmarked.
- Clarity
- Accessible to practitioners; a single read conveys the system and workflow, with familiarity in production rigging helping.
- How to read it
- Read once for the data-model and dual-graph ideas and the pose-centric sculpting workflow; revisit specific sections only for pipeline lessons relevant to your own rigging system.
Builds on
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- How the Rig Design Impacts the Animation Process 2021 / DigiPro
- LibEE: A Multithreaded Dependency Graph for Character Animation 2012 / DigiPro
- Sketch-Based Controllers for Blendshape Facial Animation 2015 / Eurographics
- Direct manipulation of blendshapes using a sketch-based interface 2018 / Web3D
Keywords
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