Pixar

Chen Shen

Timothy S Milliron

Apurva Shah

Meng Yu

William Reeves

Bena L Currin

Techniques that give animators the direct control they are accustomed to with key frame animation, while providing for path-based motion. A key frame animation-based interface is used to achieve path-based motion with rotation animation variable value correction using additional animation variables for smoothing. The value of the additional animation variables for smoothing can be directly controlled using a tangent handle in a user interface.

Driving systems extension

Systems and methods for positioning a component of an inverse kinematics (IK) controlled animated object relative to a surface object. To help users deal with foot-ground (or other object-object) interactions efficiently, a foot-ground locking system is provided as a preprocessor to an inverse kinematics (IK) controller to automatically pose the foot on the ground. The foot is first rotated to reach the maximal contact area with the ground, then translated to touch the ground, and finally deformed to conform more tightly to the ground. The system works properly with other foot shape deformations, such as toe, heel, and ball rotations. The foot-ground locking can be used either as an interactive tool to help animators identify where the ground is or as a batch postprocessing tool to clean up foot-ground contacts whenever the animation or ground environment is changed.

Systems and methods for locking inverse kinematic (IK) objects to a surface object

The space including a particle system is discretized into volume elements. Signed distance values at each time and velocity values at a time are assigned to volume elements based on the particle system. The each volume element's position at the current time is extrapolated to an additional position at each additional time based on its respective velocity value. A temporally coherent signed distance value for each volume element is determined from its signed distance value and the signed distance values at the associated additional position at each additional time. A surface extracted from the temporally coherent signed distance values will be temporally coherent over the interval including the current time and the one or more additional times. Arbitrary surface properties may also be associated with volume elements and temporally coherent surface property values may be determined for each volume element using its respective velocity value in a similar manner.

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Emeryville, CA, United States of America

Chen Shen