← ArchivePaper2020
Making Souls: Methods and a Pipeline for Volumetric Characters
Describes the pipeline for Soul's volumetric characters, procedurally generating volumes and linework from standard surface geometry rigs on the renderfarm.
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.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk: a volumetric-character pipeline breakdown
- Contributions
- Demonstrates a pipeline that procedurally derives volumetric form and dynamically changing linework from standard rigged surface geometry (in Houdini).
- Shows an automated, configurable system for managing the heavy numerical computation on the renderfarm.
- Shows how downstream render data is kept in sync with changes to character performances.
- Context
- Relates to studio procedural-geometry frameworks such as Hankins' 'Dataflow', applied here to the stylized soul characters of Pixar's Soul.Builds on: Dataflow: ILM's Framework for Procedural Geometry Generation, Simulation Authoring, Crowds, and More
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; the results are production-proven on a single film with a specific stylized look, so methods are reported as what worked for this show rather than as generally validated claims.
- Clarity
- Accessible and narrative; a first pass conveys the goals and the pipeline shape without needing a formal second pass.
- How to read it
- Read for the workflow and the rigged-surface-to-volume strategy and how compute was managed at scale; skim once unless you are building a similar procedural volumetric pipeline.
Builds on
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- USD and Scene Interoperability: Demystifying the State of the Art 2018 / SIGGRAPH Courses
- Eyes Without a Face: Integrating Detached Facial Features into Pixar's Character Pipeline 2023 / SIGGRAPH
- USD in Production 2023 / SIGGRAPH Courses
- Universal Scene Description: Open Source Release 2016 / Tech Note
Keywords
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