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Finding Hank
Ryan Kautzman, Bill Wise, Meng Yu, Per Karlsson, Mark Hessler, Audrey Wong
Describes the simulation rig for Finding Dory's septapus Hank, covering flesh simulation, sucker dynamics, and mantle behavior built on a complex animation rig.
Abstract
Bringing the complex octopus character Hank to screen required specialized meshes for body, suckers, and mantle along with volumetric simulation for flesh and skin dynamics. The team developed a new modular meshing pipeline enabling independent refinement and conforming operations to handle high curvature and complex features. Sucker behavior combined art-directed shapes with physics-based simulation for stiction and mutual dynamics between tentacle flesh and individual suckers. Novel pre-roll techniques procedurally unfolded the character's convoluted rigging state to initialize simulation cleanly.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / character simulation breakdown
- Contributions
- A modular meshing pipeline for body, suckers, and mantle allowing independent refinement and conforming operations on high-curvature features
- Combined art-directed and physics-based sucker behavior, including stiction and mutual dynamics between tentacle flesh and individual suckers
- Procedural pre-roll techniques that unfold the character's convoluted rigging state to cleanly initialize simulation
- Context
- Relates to skinned cloth and contact simulation in the lineage of Bridson et al.'s collision and friction treatment, applied to a soft-bodied octopus character (Finding Dory's Hank).Builds on: Robust Treatment of Collisions, Contact and Friction for a Skinned Cloth Simulation
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on a single complex character, so techniques are tuned to that creature rather than presented as a general benchmark.
- Clarity
- Accessible as a war-story breakdown; one pass conveys the problems and the chosen solutions without heavy formalism.
- How to read it
- Read once for the meshing, sucker-dynamics, and pre-roll ideas; treat it as practical inspiration for soft-creature rigs rather than a reproducible algorithm.
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- Dynamic Deformables: Implementation and Production Practicalities 2020 / SIGGRAPH Courses
- Clean Cloth Inputs: Removing Character Self-Intersections with Volume Simulation 2018 / SIGGRAPH
- Smeat: ADMM Based Tools for Character Deformation 2018 / SIGGRAPH Asia Technical Briefs
- A Deep Emulator for Secondary Motion of 3D Characters 2021 / CVPR
Keywords
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