Pixar

Frank Sebastian Grassia

Marco Jorge Da Silva

Peter Bernard Demoreuille

Andrew Witkin

Arun Rao

Michael K O'Brien

Thomas A Hahn

Malcolm Blanchard

Michael Shantzis

Paul Edmondson

A file format that includes a constant section and a varying section. The constant section provides a referencing scheme that references the various components that comprise the scene, as well as a listing of attributes of the scene that are modifiable. Within the same file format, the varying section provides an overriding mechanism to modify the attributes that are available to be modified. Accordingly, the disclosed file format can access cached animated geometry directly and/or aggregate other files via the aforementioned referencing and sparse override semantics. This allows the same set of inspection, manipulation, and rendering tools to be used throughout the rendering pipeline, from asset creation to final rendering.

File format for representing a scene

Techniques that enable users (e.g., animators) to accurately animate models in a scene without having to load all the models involved in the scene concurrently in computer memory. For a particular model that a user wishes to animate, only a minimal set of models involved in the scene that are needed for the particular model to evaluate correctly are determined and loaded into computer memory. Additionally, if a particular model is to be unloaded from computer memory, then all models that depend, either directly or indirectly, on the particular model and that are loaded in memory are also unloaded from memory in order to avoid incorrect animation.

Techniques for animating complex scenes

Techniques for automatically maintaining continuity in animation across discrete animation changes. Smooth animation is achieved without forcing the animator to manually calculate compensation values or introducing extra controls to the models that are animated. Continuity or smoothness of the animation is maintained as varying aspects of the animation change under continued authoring.

Techniques for automatically maintaining continuity across discrete animation changes

Techniques that facilitate rendering of a scene of arbitrary complexity without having to load all the models involved in the scene simultaneously in computer memory. A representation of the inputs and outputs of the various models involved in the scene and the dependencies between the inputs and the outputs is provided and used to facilitate the rendering process. A tessellator may tessellate the models without having to load information for all the models concurrently into computer memory. The tessellated scene may then be rendered without having to load all the models in the scene concurrently into computer memory.

Techniques for rendering complex scenes

Techniques for processing scenes of arbitrary complexity comprising a number of objects represented by models. Techniques are provided for building a representation in memory that stores information or represents the inter and intra-model dependencies between the various inputs and outputs of the models included in a scene. The memory representation is built based upon intra-model dependencies information and cues information for the scene. In one embodiment, the memory representation is a graph comprising a number of nodes and directed links between the nodes. The nodes in the graph represent (are proxies for) inputs and outputs of the models involved in the scene. The directed links between the nodes represent the intra- and inter-model dependencies between the inputs and outputs.

Growing community of inventors

Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Frank Sebastian Grassia