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Sculpt Processing for Character Rigging
Fernando de Goes, Patrick Coleman, Michael Comet, Alonso Martinez
Suite of geometric tools for sculpt generation and reuse in character rigs: sculpt transfer, surface reconstruction, and relaxation, showcased on Onward and Soul.
Abstract
Pose-space sculpting is a key component in character rigging workflows used by digital artists to create shape corrections that fire on top of deformation rigs. However, hand-crafting sculpts one pose at time is notoriously laborious, involving multiple cleanup passes as well as repetitive manual edits. In this work, we present a suite of geometric tools that have significantly sped up the generation and reuse of production-quality sculpts in character rigs at Pixar. These tools include a transfer technique that refits sculpts from one model to another, a surface reconstruction method that resolves entangled regions, and a relaxation scheme that restores surface details. Importantly, our approach allows riggers to focus their time on making creative sculpt edits to meet stylistic goals, thus enabling quicker turnarounds and larger design changes with a reduced impact on production. We showcase the results generated by our tools with examples from Pixar’s feature films Onward and Soul.
How to read this
- Category
- Method: geometric tools for pose-space sculpting in rigs (production-driven)
- Contributions
- A transfer technique that refits sculpts from one model to another
- A surface reconstruction method that resolves entangled regions
- A relaxation scheme that restores surface details, reducing manual sculpt cleanup
- Context
- Extends de Goes' patch-based surface relaxation into a sculpt-processing suite for pose-space corrective shapes in character rigging at Pixar.Builds on: Patch-based Surface Relaxation
- Correctness
- Showcased on production characters from Onward and Soul; results are demonstrated as production-quality and labor-saving rather than benchmarked against alternatives, so the evidence is practical and example-driven, with effectiveness tied to the rigging workflows it targets.
- Clarity
- Clear and well-motivated by the artist workflow; the geometric methods reward a second pass.
- How to read it
- First pass for the three tools and the workflow pain they remove; second pass on the transfer and reconstruction math if you build rigging pipelines.
Builds on
Built upon by
Related work
- Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters 2016 / CGF
- Wires: A Geometric Deformation Technique 1998 / SIGGRAPH
- SkinMixer: Blending 3D Animated Models 2022 / SIGGRAPH Asia
- Avatar Reshaping and Automatic Rigging Using a Deformable Model 2015 / MIG
Keywords
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