Underwater Procedural Vegetation on Pixar’s Luca

ABSTRACT

On Luca, we extended the procedural vegetation and debris system, called Moss, which has been in use at Pixar since Brave, with capabilities to create lush underwater seascapes. The Moss system was modernized for Onward to be OSL (Open Shading Language) based, enabling artists without C++ expertise to develop new Moss types. For Luca, we added a deformable mesh geometry type for complex underwater vegetation. Additionally we added SeaWind, an OSL-based procedural motion module, to hit the specific art direction of flowing curves in underwater currents. We also improved the pipeline which brings procedural geometry into Houdini for integrating the hero simulation with the procedural motion seamlessly.

References

1. Dave Dixon, Matt Johnson, Andy Whittock, Peter Roe, Jamie Hecker, and Matt Kuruc. 2020. Procedural Geometry with Open Shading Language on Pixar’s Onward and Soul. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 Talks (Virtual Event, USA) (SIGGRAPH ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 38, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3388767.3407372

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Animation

    • Shape modeling