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Mobilizing Mocap, Motion Blending, and Mayhem: Rig Interoperability for Crowd Simulation on Incredibles 2
Pixar approximates complex Presto crowd rigs with skinned skeletons to enable mocap, motion blending, and ragdoll physics interchange for Incredibles 2 crowd pipeline.
Abstract
The stylized world of Incredibles 2 features large urban crowds both in everyday situations and in scenes of panicked mayhem. While Pixar's now academy award winning animation software, Presto, has allowed us to create expressive and nuanced rigs for our crowd characters, our proprietary approach has made it difficult to utilize animation from external sources, such as crowd simulations or from motion capture. In this talk, we discuss how we can automatically approximate our complex rigs with skinned skeletons, as well as how this has opened up our crowd pipeline to procedural look-ats, motion blending, ragdoll physics, and motion capture. In particular, the use of motion capture is novel for Pixar, and finding a way to integrate this workflow into our animator-centric pipeline and culture has been an ongoing effort. The system we designed allows us to capture motion data for multiple characters in the context of complex shots in Presto, and it facilitates choreography of nuanced and specifically timed crowd motions. Together with traditional hand animated motion cycles, our crowd choreography tools in Presto [Arumugam et al., 2013], and skeletal agent based simulation in SideFX's Houdini [SideFX, [n. d.]] via our MURE tools [Gustafson et al., 2016], the crowds team on Incredibles 2 produced rich scenes of busy streets and urban panic.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / pipeline breakdown (rig interoperability for crowds)
- Contributions
- Automatically approximates complex proprietary Presto crowd rigs with skinned skeletons
- Opens the crowd pipeline to procedural look-ats, motion blending, ragdoll physics, and motion capture
- Integrates multi-character mocap capture and crowd choreography into Pixar's animator-centric workflow
- Context
- Relates to Pixar's crowd and scene-description tooling (referenced Universal Scene Description release), bridging the proprietary Presto rig to interchange formats used by external simulation and mocap sources.Builds on: Universal Scene Description: Open Source Release
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on Incredibles 2, so a reader should treat the skinned-skeleton approximation as a pragmatic interchange device rather than a general accuracy guarantee.
- Clarity
- Accessible and narrative; a single first pass conveys the pipeline goals and the interchange idea.
- How to read it
- Read once for the workflow motivation and the approximate-rig-as-skeleton trick; no formulation to chase, so focus on which interchange capabilities (look-ats, blending, ragdoll, mocap) each step unlocks.
Builds on
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- Motion Retargeting for Crowd Simulation 2015 / DigiPro
- Automatic Rigging and Animation of 3D Characters 2007 / SIGGRAPH
- Real-Time Weighted Pose-Space Deformation on the GPU 2006 / CGF
- MoRig: Motion-Aware Rigging of Character Meshes from Point Clouds 2022 / SIGGRAPH Asia
Keywords
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