Papers by John Anderson


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Volumetric Methods for Simulation and Rendering of Hair

Lena Petrovic, Mark Henne, John Anderson
January 2005

Hair is one of the crucial elements in representing believable digital humans. It is one of the most challenging elements, too, due to the large number of hairs on a human head, their length, and their complex interactions. Hair appearance, in rendering and simulation, is ... more

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [clip1.mp4], [clip2.mp4], [clip3.mp4], [clip4.mp4], [clip5.mp4], [clip6.mp4]

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #06-08


Statistical Acceleration for Animated Global Illumination

Mark Meyer, John Anderson
January 2006

Global illumination provides important visual cues to an animation, however its computational expense limits its use in practice. In this paper, we present an easy to implement technique for accelerating the computation of indirect illumination for an animated sequence using stochastic ray tracing. We begin by computing a quick but noisy solution using a ... more

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [ShotRender.mov]

To appear in SIGGRAPH 2006

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #06-03


Key Point Subspace Acceleration and Soft Caching

Mark Meyer, John Anderson
May 2007

Many applications in Computer Graphics contain computationally expensive calculations. These calculations are often performed at many points to produce a full solution, even though the subspace of reasonable solutions may be of a relatively low dimension. The calculation of facial articulation and rendering of scenes with global illumination are two example applications that ... more

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [SiggraphSlides.pdf], [softCaching.mov]

Available in the proceedings of Siggraph 2007

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #06-04b

Other versions:


Animating Oscillatory Motion With Overlap: Wiggly Splines

Michael Kass, John Anderson
June 2008

Oscillatory motion is ubiquitous in computer graphics, yet existing animation techniques are ill-suited to its authoring. We introduce a new type of spline for this purpose, known as a ``Wiggly Spline.'' The spline generalizes traditional piecewise cubics when its resonance and damping are set to zero, but creates oscillatory animation when its resonance and damping ... more

Paper (PDF)

Available in SIGGRAPH 2008

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #06-06a

Other versions:


Tone Mapping High Dynamic Range Videos using Wavelets

Qi Shan, Mark Meyer, Tony DeRose, John Anderson
January 2012

We propose a novel 3D wavelet based tone mapping framework for high dynamic range videos. Still image tone mapping methods can be applied to videos in a frame by frame fashion, but they often exhibit haloing artifacts and do not guarantee temporal coherence, resulting in flickering. Directly extending wavelet analysis/synthesis ... more

Paper (PDF)

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #12-01


Artistic Simulation of Curly Hair

Hayley Iben, Mark Meyer, Lena Petrovic, Olivier Soares, John Anderson, Andrew Witkin
July 2013

Artistic simulation of hair presents many challenges - ranging from incorporating artistic control to dealing with extreme motions of characters. Additionally, in a production environment, the simulation needs to be fast and results need to be usable "out of the box" (without extensive parameter modifications) in order to produce ... more

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [tazVideo-SCA.mov]

Available in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Animation 2013.

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #12-03b

Other versions: