Kizamu: a system for sculpting digital characters

ABSTRACT

This paper presents Kizamu, a computer-based sculpting system for creating digital characters for the entertainment industry. Kizamu incorporates a blend of new algorithms, significant technical advances, and novel user interaction paradigms into a system that is both powerful and unique.

To meet the demands of high-end digital character design, Kizamu addresses three requirements posed to us by a major production studio. First, animators and artists want digital clay — a medium with the characteristics of real clay and the advantages of being digital. Second, the system should run on standard hardware at interactive rates. Finally, the system must accept and generate standard 3D representations thereby enabling integration into an existing animation production pipeline.

At the heart of the Kizamu system are Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields (ADFs), a volumetric shape representation with the characteristics required for digital clay. In this paper, we describe the system and present the major research advances in ADFs that were required to make Kizamu a reality.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document capture

      • Graphics recognition and interpretation

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Graphics systems and interfaces

    • Image manipulation

    • Rendering

    • Shape modeling

• Theory of computation

  • Randomness, geometry and discrete structures

    • Computational geometry