Animal Logic

We present Animal Logic’s solution to simulate light refraction in deformable characters’ eye corneas in Autodesk® Maya®’s viewport, with a result close to the final render, significantly reducing iterations for facial animation workflow. Our approach is tightly integrated with Animal Logic’s GPU-based deformation engine for a minimal impact on playback. The refraction is generated automatically from the scene’s geometries and a simplified shading definition exported by the lookdev department using Pixar® Universal Scene Description. It has proven to give reliable results, allowing for its adoption in production for all current and upcoming shows.

We introduce Animal Logic’s advanced 3D matte painting toolset AL_USDNuke, which seamlessly integrates Nuke into our USD-centric pipeline. We detail the integration of numerous components such as our path-traced GlimpseViewport for instant representation of large USD stages, a user-friendly node-based toolset to modify USD stages, visualisation by our in-house renderer Glimpse for high-fidelity ground-truth feedback, and complementary views to efficiently manage USD stages inside Nuke. This was achieved by a specialised Nuke to USD translator and our brand-new framework Plasma, an enhancement of Animal Logic’s in-house Nucleus framework for large-scale application development, tailored to Nuke. These developments improve matte painting artists’ efficiency on complex USD stages and allow them to publish their work into shots for the benefit of all other upstream as well as downstream departments.

course Share on Demystifying OpenUSD: End-to-End Data Pipelines and Workflows Authors: Jens Jebens NVIDIA NVIDIAView Profile , Steve Agland Animal Logic Animal LogicView Profile , Jerran Schmidt NVIDIA NVIDIAView Profile , Pal Mezei NVIDIA NVIDIAView Profile , Aloys Baillet NVIDIA NVIDIAView Profile Authors Info & Claims SA '23: SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 CoursesDecember 2023Article No.: 6Pages 1–191https://doi.org/10.1145/3610538.3614635Published:06 December 2023Publication History 0citation118DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads118Last 12 Months118Last 6 weeks29 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

For over 32 years Animal Logic has played a major role in the growth of the Animation and Visual Effects industry in Australia and globally. In this talk we will look at the breadth of initiatives, from hosting work experience student programs for high schools, through partnering with universities and hosting trainees. We explore how the company's values have been expressed through these, demonstrating how these have benefited the company and the greater community.

We describe key steps in the process by which an animation and VFX studio (Animal Logic) integrated Pixar’s Universal Scene Description™ into a large existing legacy pipeline. We discuss various architectural choices, as well as software systems developed to support these patterns. This successful USD migration has enabled the studio to significantly improve its toolchain productivity, supporting the simultaneous development of multiple feature films.