Sculpt processing for character rigging

Abstract

Pose-space sculpting is a key component in character rigging workflows used by digital artists to create shape corrections that fire on top of deformation rigs. However, hand-crafting sculpts one pose at time is notoriously laborious, involving multiple cleanup passes as well as repetitive manual edits. In this work, we present a suite of geometric tools that have significantly sped up the generation and reuse of production-quality sculpts in character rigs at Pixar. These tools include a transfer technique that refits sculpts from one model to another, a surface reconstruction method that resolves entangled regions, and a relaxation scheme that restores surface details. Importantly, our approach allows riggers to focus their time on making creative sculpt edits to meet stylistic goals, thus enabling quicker turnarounds and larger design changes with a reduced impact on production. We showcase the results generated by our tools with examples from Pixar's feature films Onward and Soul.