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LibEE: a multithreaded dependency graph for character animation

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Kevin OchsAuthors Info & Claims

DigiPro '12: Proceedings of the Digital Production Symposium

Pages 59 - 66

https://doi.org/10.1145/2370919.2370930

Published: 04 August 2012 Publication History

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Abstract

Computer-generated characters are central to an animated feature film and need to deliver appealing, believable on-screen performances. As such, character rigs continue to expand in complexity (for example higher fidelity skin, clothing and hair). This leads to growing system demands as animators wish to interact with complex rigs at interactive frame rates. Since single threaded CPU performance is no longer increasing at previous rates, we must find alternative means to improve rig performance. This paper focuses on multithreading our animation software and, in particular, our character setups to take advantage of multicore CPU architectures.

We have developed a new dependency graph (DG) evaluation engine called LibEE for our next generation in-house animation tool. LibEE is designed from the ground up to be very heavily multithreaded, and is thus able to deliver extremely high performance characters for use on computer-animated feature films.

A heavily multithreaded graph requires not just that individual expensive nodes in the graph are internally threaded, but that multiple nodes in the graph can evaluate concurrently. This raises numerous concerns. For example, how do we ensure the cores are used most effectively, how do we handle non-threadsafe code, and how do we provide profiling tools for production to ensure character graphs are optimized for parallel evaluation.

We present the motivation, design choices and implementation of the graph engine itself, and then discuss production adoption considerations.

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Tseng CKwa BBryson SGong M(2024)Premo: Overrides Data ModelProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670985(1-6)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670985
Bryson SGong MO'Neill RForgrave TKwa BDiLorenzo P(2023)Premo: Powerful Character Rigging, Fast AnimationACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Talks10.1145/3587421.3595468(1-2)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587421.3595468
Bailey SOmens DDilorenzo PO'Brien J(2020)Fast and deep facial deformationsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3386569.339239739:4(94:1-94:15)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386569.3392397
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Published In

DigiPro '12: Proceedings of the Digital Production Symposium

August 2012

80 pages

ISBN:9781450316491

DOI:10.1145/2370919

Conference Chairs:
Armin Bruderlin
Sony Pictures Imageworks
,
Ken Anjyo
OLM Digital, Inc.
,
Program Chairs:
Eric Enderton
NVIDIA
,
Larry Cutler
PDI/Dreamworks

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 August 2012

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August 4, 2012

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670985
Bryson SGong MO'Neill RForgrave TKwa BDiLorenzo P(2023)Premo: Powerful Character Rigging, Fast AnimationACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Talks10.1145/3587421.3595468(1-2)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587421.3595468
Bailey SOmens DDilorenzo PO'Brien J(2020)Fast and deep facial deformationsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3386569.339239739:4(94:1-94:15)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386569.3392397
Bryson SPapp EBalents BGossett CPhillips CRose R(2018)LibEE 2Proceedings of the 8th Annual Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3233085.3233089(1-2)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3233085.3233089
Chen JBao HWang TDesbrun MHuang J(2018)Numerical coarsening using discontinuous shape functionsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3197517.320138637:4(1-12)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
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LibEE 2: enabling fast edits and evaluation

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Simulation-based in-between creation for CACAni system

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