A Houdini Pipeline for Volumetric Characters in Pixar's Soul
Here's how the team created stylized volumetric characters for their latest project.
We love the latest masterpiece from Pixar, Soul, and how the team improved their pipeline to create stunning visuals. One of the challenges was creating characters with a stylized appearance in a unique world. Check out a paper by Pixar discussing how they created volumetric characters.
"Everyone from the art department and character modelers and shaders to the technical directors and developers in the effects, lighting, and software groups collaborated to bring this new visual style to screen," wrote the team. "The soul world is abstract and ethereal; this needed to be balanced with visual clarity and design appeal."
Pixar's character rigging and animation tools use rigged surfaces, and one of the key challenges was "presenting a new representation derived from this data that meets our visual goals." In order to achieve softness of volumetric form and dynamically changing linework, the team designed a system to procedurally generate the data in Houdini.
The task required significant numerical computation to create the data at the needed fidelity. "We developed an automated system for managing this computation in a configurable way, while keeping data for downstream renders in sync with changes to character performances," wrote the Pixar graphics team.
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