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Flesh, Flab, and Fascia Simulation on Zootopia
Andy Milne, Mark McLaughlin, Rasmus Tamstorf, Alexey Stomakhin, Nicolas Burkhard, Mitch Counsell, Jesus Canal, David Komorowski, Evan Goldberg
Character soft-tissue simulation system for Zootopia scaling from hero to crowd characters, capturing subtle animal flesh and fur dynamics with artistic controls.
Abstract
This SIGGRAPH talk describes the character flesh simulation techniques developed for Disney's Zootopia to give anthropomorphic mammal characters a sense of weight, jiggle, volume preservation, and self-collision while still allowing 2D-animator art direction. The studio productized the grid-based PhysGrid flesh simulator, which embeds a surface mesh in a volumetric grid rather than requiring tetrahedral meshing, and added SIMD vectorization, generalized-alpha integration, and triangle-mesh methods replacing level sets. A deforming body bone bound to the animated surface mesh controls how closely the simulation follows animation, and a delta-based process combines simulation with skinning and pose space deformation for sensitive areas such as facial cheeks. For a savage jaguar, anatomically plausible bones, muscles, a fascia cloth layer, and a dermal fat layer were simulated to reveal creature-style anatomy with the same toolset.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / character flesh-simulation system
- Contributions
- Productized the grid-based PhysGrid flesh simulator that embeds a surface mesh in a volumetric grid, avoiding tetrahedral meshing
- Added SIMD vectorization, generalized-alpha integration, and triangle-mesh methods replacing level sets, with a deforming body bone to control how closely simulation follows animation
- A delta-based process combining simulation with skinning and pose-space deformation, and an anatomical layered setup (bones, muscles, fascia cloth, dermal fat) for a savage jaguar
- Context
- Relates to anatomical and musculoskeletal simulation in the lineage of Teran et al.'s skeletal muscle work, adapted for stylized anthropomorphic mammals scaling from hero to crowd (Disney's Zootopia).Builds on: Creating and Simulating Skeletal Muscle from the Visible Human Data Set
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven across hero and crowd characters, with the explicit constraint that simulation must preserve 2D-animator art direction rather than chase pure physical accuracy.
- Clarity
- Accessible as a systems talk; one pass conveys the architecture and the art-direction trade-offs, with details kept at the production-overview level.
- How to read it
- Read once for the grid-based simulation choice and the simulation-vs-animation control scheme; revisit the delta/PSD blending section if you are building a similar art-directable flesh pipeline.
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- How to Build a Human: Practical Physics-Based Character Animation 2016 / DigiPro
- Muscle and Fascia Simulation with Extended Position Based Dynamics 2020 / CGF
- Efficient Elasticity for Character Skinning with Contact and Collisions 2011 / SIGGRAPH
- Character Rigging, Deformations, and Simulations in Film and Game Production 2011 / SIGGRAPH Courses
Keywords
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