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Hair Emoting with Style Guides in Turning Red

Brandon Montell, Fernando de Goes, Jacob Brooks

SIGGRAPHPixar2 cites1 descendantCFX

Describes Pixar's style-guide system for art-directing millions of hair and fur curves to reflect characters' emotional states in Turning Red.

Abstract

For Pixar’s feature film Turning Red, the grooming and simulation teams faced the challenge of handling characters with millions of fur and hair curves, which often needed to behave differently in each shot reflecting the characters’ emotional states. This work describes new tools developed to assist artists in managing and sculpting these large amounts of fur and hair. In particular, we present a novel surface-aware technique for curve deformation that interpolates hair sculpts at varying levels of detail, accompanied by a customized user interface for interactively browsing hair layers.

How to read this

Category
Production talk / tooling description
Contributions
  • A style-guide system for art-directing millions of fur and hair curves to reflect characters' emotional states (Turning Red)
  • A surface-aware curve-deformation technique that interpolates hair sculpts at varying levels of detail
  • A custom UI for interactively browsing hair layers
Context
Builds on prior hair shape-control work (related to Holding the Shape in Hair Simulation, Iben 2019), extending it toward emotional, per-shot art direction at production scale.Builds on: Holding the Shape in Hair Simulation
Correctness
Studio practice on a single feature film; results are production-proven rather than benchmarked, so the surface-aware interpolation should be read as fit-for-purpose for Pixar's pipeline rather than a generalized, validated algorithm.
Clarity
Accessible and tool-focused; a single pass conveys the workflow, with a second pass paying off mainly for the surface-aware deformation idea.
How to read it
Read for the artist-workflow and style-guide concept; skim once unless the surface-aware multi-LOD curve deformation is directly relevant to your pipeline.

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