A presentation by Cassidy Curtis of Google Research on April 12 2023, hosted by the San Francisco chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH.
Date and time: Wednesday, April 12, 2023 · 6 – 8pm PDT
Location: Online
In linear media like movies and TV, animated characters have delivered genuine, compelling, emotionally nuanced acting performances for decades. In comparison, their counterparts in interactive media like games often feel a bit robotic. What’s missing, and how can we bridge that gap? In this talk we’ll discuss why believable acting is such a hard problem, break it down into a concrete list of core principles, and present our early steps toward generating a believable performance autonomously in real time, using internally motivated reinforcement learning and procedural animation.
For more details, see the project page.
Speaker Bio: Cassidy Curtis was an animator at PDI/DreamWorks for two decades, and supervised animation on such characters as Toothless in How to Train Your Dragon and Alex the Lion in the Madagascar movies. He fell in love with real-time graphics as a technical art lead at Google Spotlight Stories, where he developed stylized rendering techniques for animated VR films like Pearl, Son of Jaguar, and Age of Sail. He is now the animation lead for the Synthetic Characters team at Google Research.
