Papers by Paul Kanyuk


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Rivers of Rodents: An Animation-Centric Crowds Pipeline for Ratatouille

David Ryu, Paul Kanyuk
May 2007

One of the major technical challenges in the animated film Ratatouille was creating a believable rat colony. In numbers as high as a thousand, these rats participated in highly complex and coordinated behaviors ranging from chaotic swarming to gourmet cooking. Often, the colony was ... more

Paper (PDF)

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #07-02


Creating Elemental Characters: From Sparks to Fire

Jonathan Hoffman, Te Hu, Paul Kanyuk, Stephen Marshall, George Nguyen, Hope Schroers, Patrick Witting
May 2023

Pixar has a long history of creating high-quality effects and characters that aid in the telling of wonderful stories. With Disney and Pixar's Elemental, we have taken the next groundbreaking step in creating fully simulated, animated, and stylized characters. In this talk, we will present the framework and process that ... more

Paper (PDF)

SIGGRAPH Talks 2023


Everybody's an Effect: Scalable Volumetric Crowds on Elemental

Sasha Ouellet, Aksel Taylan, Arnold Moon, Paul Kanyuk, William Reeves
May 2023

Crowd animation and rendering is challenging enough with hard surface models, but the world of Elemental takes this to a new level by immersing the viewer in a teeming metropolis populated by sentient air, fire, and water, in the form of volumetric characters. By building a new Houdini-Engine character pipeline ... more

Paper (PDF)

SIGGRAPH Talks 2023


Singed Silhouettes and Feed Forward Flames: Volumetric Neural Style Transfer for Expressive Fire Simulation

Paul Kanyuk, Vinicius C. Azevedo, Raphael Ortiz, Jingwei Tang
May 2023

While controlling simulated gaseous volumes remains an ongoing battle when seeking realism in computer graphics, creating appealing characters entirely out of these simulations brought this challenge to an entirely new level in Pixar's film Elemental. For fire characters, like the protagonist Ember, their faces and bodies needed to look and ... more

Paper (PDF)

SIGGRAPH Talks 2023


Controllable Neural Style Transfer for Dynamic Meshes

Guilherme G. Haetinger, Jingwei Tang, Raphael Ortiz, Paul Kanyuk, Vinicius C. Azevedo
July 2024

In recent years, animation movies are shifting from realistic representations to more stylized depictions that support unique design languages. To favor that, recent works implemented a Neural Style Transfer (NST) pipeline that supports the stylization of 3D assets by 2D images. In this paper we propose a novel mesh stylization ... more

Paper (PDF)

SIGGRAPH 2024