Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
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Computer Science Seminar

Real Time Character Animation: Deformation, Rendering, and Beyond

When: Wednesday, October 02, 2019
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Binh Le, Electronic Arts Research

Host: Dr. Zhigang Deng

Characters are the focus of any movie or game. While the actions of the characters are the main medium to convey the story, the dynamic of these actions poses many technical challenges for animation and rendering systems. In this talk, I will present my recent research works on real time character animation, including: (1) Skinning with Optimized Centers of Rotation and Direct Delta Mush, two novel direct geometry skinning methods with high quality, performance and backwards compatibility with the animation pipeline, and (2) Ambient Occlusion learning for animated characters in the object space. I will also discuss some open problems in real time graphics and animation for video game industry.

Bio:

Binh Le is a senior research scientist at Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division, Electronic Arts (SEED-EA). Prior to joining EA, he was a postdoc at Disney Research Pittsburgh and Pixar Research Group. Between 2008 and 2012, he was a PhD student at the Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Lab, University of Houston. Binh’s research focus is on computer graphics, animation, machine learning, optimization, and numerical computing. His work has been published in top-tier conferences and journals such as SIGGRAPH, TVCG, I3D, SCA. The skinning decomposition technique that Binh co-developed with Dr. Zhigang Deng at UH back in 2012 is now used in the game industry as a de-facto standard choice for cinematic shots and other rigging tasks.