research-article

LibEE: a multithreaded dependency graph for character animation

Authors:

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

Get Access

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.

References

[1]

Budimlic, Z., Burke, M. G., Cavé, V., Knobe, K., Lowney, G., Newton, R., Palsberg, J., Peixotto, D. M., Sarkar, V., Schlimbach, F., and Tasirlar, S. 2010. Concurrent collections. Scientific Programming 18, 3--4, 203--217.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Enderton, E., and Wexler, D. 2011. The workflow scale: Why 5x faster might not be enough. In Computer Graphics International 2011.

Google Scholar

[3]

Kry, P. G., James, D. L., and Pai, D. K. 2002. Eigenskin: Real time large deformation character skinning in hardware. In ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation, 153--160.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Lewis, J. P., Cordner, M., and Fong, N. 2000. Pose space deformations: A unified approach to shape interpolation and skeleton-driven deformation. In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2000, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 165--172.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

McLaughlin, T., Cutler, L., and Coleman, D. 2011. Character rigging, deformations, and simulations in film and game production. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 Courses, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SIGGRAPH '11, 5:1--5:18.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Meyer, M., and Anderson, J. 2007. Key point subspace acceleration and soft caching. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 papers, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SIGGRAPH '07.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Osterburg, S., Dirksen, N., and Vogt, R. 2008. Art-directable dynamic-hair shells in madagascar: Escape 2 africa. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 talks, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SIGGRAPH '08, 48:1--48:1.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Reinders, J. 2007. Intel Threading Building Blocks. O'Reilly.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

Shi, X., Zhou, K., Tong, Y., Desbrun, M., Bao, H., and Guo, B. 2008. Example-based dynamic skinning in real time. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 papers, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SIGGRAPH '08, 29:1--29:8.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

Sutter, H. 2005. The free lunch is over: A fundamental turn toward concurrency in software. Dr. Dobb's Journal 30, 3.

Google Scholar

[11]

Wang, X. C., and Phillips, C. 2002. Multi-weight enveloping: Least-squares approximation techniques for skin animation. In ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation, 129--138.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

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
Show More Cited By

LibEE: a multithreaded dependency graph for character animation
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics

Recommendations

LibEE 2: enabling fast edits and evaluation
DigiPro '18: Proceedings of the 8th Annual Digital Production Symposium

The Premo animation platform [Gong et al. 2014] developed by DreamWorks utilized LibEE v1 [Watt et al. 2012] for high performance graph evaluation. The animator experience required fast evaluation, but did not require fast editing of the graph. LibEE v1,...
An art-directed wrinkle system for CG character clothing and skin

We present a kinematic system for creating art-directed clothing and skin wrinkles on CG characters used in the production of computer-animated feature films. This system employs a curve-based method for generating wrinkles on reference poses, which are ...
Simulation-based in-between creation for CACAni system
SIGGRAPH ASIA '09: ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009 Sketches

In-between creation in traditional cel animation based on the hand-drawn key-frames is a fundamental element for the actual production and plays a symbolic role in an artistic interpretation of the scene. To create impressive in-betweens, however, ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

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]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 August 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

DigiPro '12

Sponsor:

SIGGRAPH

DigiPro '12: The Digital Production Symposium

August 4, 2012

California, Glendale

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

19
Total Citations
View Citations
406
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)9
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 01 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

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
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
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197517.3201386
Schulz AWang HGrinspun ESolomon JMatusik W(2018)Interactive exploration of design trade-offsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3197517.320138537:4(1-14)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197517.3201385
Li TGharbi MAdams ADurand FRagan-Kelley J(2018)Differentiable programming for image processing and deep learning in halideACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3197517.320138337:4(1-13)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197517.3201383
Brunton AArikan CTanksale TUrban P(2018)3D printing spatially varying color and translucencyACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3197517.320134937:4(1-13)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197517.3201349
Dai CWang CWu CLefebvre SFang GLiu Y(2018)Support-free volume printing by multi-axis motionACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3197517.320134237:4(1-14)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197517.3201342
Nakashima KAuzinger TIarussi EZhang RIgarashi TBickel B(2018)CoreCavityACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3197517.320134137:4(1-13)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197517.3201341
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Recommendations

LibEE 2: enabling fast edits and evaluation

An art-directed wrinkle system for CG character clothing and skin

Simulation-based in-between creation for CACAni system

Comments

Published In

Sponsors

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Conference

Other Metrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Cited By

Login options

Full Access

PDF

eReader

Abstract

References

Cited By

Recommendations

LibEE 2: enabling fast edits and evaluation

An art-directed wrinkle system for CG character clothing and skin

Simulation-based in-between creation for CACAni system

Comments

Information

Published In

Sponsors

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Get Access

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

eReader

Figures

Other

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media

Affiliations