Pixar autospline

I was looking through the recent Siggraph list of presentations since I didn’t go this year. The Pixar autospline title is interesting. Does anyone know what this refers to? What they are trying to solve?

http://s2016.siggraph.org/talks/sessions/get-shape

Almost certainly to the rig they created for Hank, the septopus character in Finding Dory. Here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn0S2vmSCU0

Ok. In addition, I was hoping for someone who attended the talk to give some insights as to what was said.

From the description it sounds close to this. Add controls on the fly?

Pixar finally got around to animating with Spline IK, good for them! :slight_smile:

Haha, I’m sure their solution was a LOT more complex than what that YouTube video demonstrates from ART.

I’m looking for info from the actual presentation. Please don’t post unless you can provide useful feedback for the original question.

With that kind of attitude, I’m not sure I would bother providing you any useful information. I would instead remind you that this is the internet, and that you can neither demand nor prevent anyone from contributing to a conversation held in public. Force is especially unhelpful as none of us share any obligation towards you but are giving you a piece of our time from the kindness of our hearts.

For that, despite your manner, you are welcome.

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Hazmondo, Take a glance at what ART is doing in that video.
https://www.google.com/patents/US20130088497

ART took this and was able to recreate it for Maya. This is a pretty powerful deformer and I used it for a few years while at DreamWorks. So I wouldn’t dismiss it’s complexity.
Cheers,
Sean

Of course it’s a really cool deformer, I saw a video where it was used on the fingers of a cartoony character and it looked great (I’m sure Pixar have similar skin deformers) but AutoSpline is a type of kinematics solver.

The paper is available on ACM (not free): http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2927439

Seriously? Force? Demand? All I asked is that people stay on topic.

neither MOS spline or autospline are like spline ik really. The spline is the deformer in this instance not joints riding along the spline. I haven’t checked out ART but in Maya using native nurbs curve geo it would be a bit of a rough proposition as there really are no controllable rotations built into the curves.
The interesting notion that autospline proposes is essentially the spline being the controller for animation as well as the deformer. So an animator can instance knots at any time, I’m not sure if MOS spline has that notion or if it depends on other reformers to deform it.