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Research & Development

Weta Digital is active in both practical and foundational research and development as a means to improve the quality of our work and to stay competitive in the global market for visual effects.  We believe in pursuing new and promising scientific inquiry that can provide efficiency and introduce a greater level of creativity.  Our efforts include partnership with universities and other centers of research as well as other visual effects facilities. Open Source initiatives and relationships with the commercial market are both important avenues to help us to push the boundaries of what can be done. In a world where today’s innovation is tomorrow’s limitation, staying out in front is vital in an industry that thrives on creativity.

Publications
 

  • Out-Of-Core Computations of High-Resolution Level Sets by Means of Code Transformation
    Brian Christensen, Michael Nielsen & Ken Museth 
    Journal of Scientific Computing (accepted for publication)
     
  • Guide Shapes for High Resolution Naturalistic Liquid Simulation
    Michael Nielsen & Robert Bridson
    ACM Transactions on Graphics Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2011 (accepted for publication)
     
  • A Quantized-Diffusion Model for Rendering Translucent Materials
    Eugene d'Eon & Geoffrey Irving
    ACM Transactions on Graphics Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2011 (accepted for publication)
     
  • Is there a Universal Image Synthesizer?
    Cris Calude & J.P. Lewis 
    Applied Mathematics and Computation (accepted for publication)
     
  • Spacetime Expression Cloning for Blendshapes
    Yeongho Seol, J.P. Lewis, Jaewoo Seo, Ken Anjyo, Junyong Noh
    ACM Transactions on Graphics (accepted for publication)
     
  • A Database and Evaluation Methodology for Optical Flow
    Simon Baker, Daniel Scharstein, J.P. Lewis, Stefan Roth, Michael J. Black, & Richard Szeliski
    International Journal of Computer Vision, 92, 1, 2011
     
  • Scan-Based Volume Animation Driven by Locally Adaptive Articulated Registrations
    Taehyun Rhee, J. P. Lewis, Ulrich Neumann, Krishna Nayak
    IEEE Trans. Visualisation and Computer Graphics, March 2011 
     
  • PantaRay: Fast Ray-traced Occlusion Caching of Massive Scenes
    Jacopo Pantoleoni, Luca Fascione, Martin Hill, Timo Aila
    SIGGGRAPH 2010
     
  • GradientShop: A Gradient-Domain Optimization Framework for Image and Video Filtering
    Pravin Bhat, C. Lawrence-Zitnick, Michael Cohen, Brian Curless
    ACM Transactions on Graphics Volume 29 Issue 2, March 2010
     
  • Issues in Adapting Research Algorithms to Stereoscopic Visual Effects
    Peter Hillman, J. P. Lewis, Sebastian Sylwan, Erik Winquist
    IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 2010
     
  • A Parallel Multigrid Poisson Solver for Fluids Simulation on Large Grids
    A. McAdams, E. Sifakis, J. Teran
    ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium for Computer Animation, SCA 2010
     
  • Multilinear Pose and Body Shape Estimation of Dressed Subjects from Image Sets
    Nils Hasler, H. Ackermann, B. Rosenhahn, T. Thormählen, H.-P. Seidel
    IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2010
     
  • State of the Art in Procedural Noise Functions
    Ares Lagae, Sylvain Lefebvre, Rob Cook, Tony DeRose, George Drettakis, D.S. Ebert, J.P. Lewis, Ken Perlin & Matthias Zwicker
    Eurographics, 2010 
     
  • Direct Manipulation Blendshapes
    J. P. Lewis, Ken Anjyo
    IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, special issue: Digital Human Faces, July/August 2010 
     
  • Stable and Efficient Differential IK
    J.P. Lewis
    Siggraph Asia, 2010 Sketches
     
  • Improved Variational Guiding of Smoke Animations
    Michael Nielsen
    Eurographics, 2010 

  • The Application of Vision Algorithms to Visual Effects Production
    Sebastian Sylwan
    ACCV, 2010 
     
  • Computational Physics in Film
    R. Bridson & C. Batty
    Science 330, 2010
     
  • Identifying Salient Points
    J.P. Lewis & Ken Anjyo
    SIGGRAPH Asia, 2009 Sketches

  • Adaptive Non-Rigid Registration of 3D Knee MRI in Different Poses Spaces
    Taehyun Rhee, J. P. Lewis, Krishna Nayak, Ulrich Neumann
    IEEE International Symposium On Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2008

  • Creating An Animatable 3D Volume Hand Model from in vivo MRI
    Taehyun Rhee, J. P. Lewis, Krishna Nayak, Ulrich Neumann
    Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR), 2008
  • Learning Optical Flow
    Deqing Sun, Stefan Roth, J. P. Lewis, Michael Black
    Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 5304, 2008

  • A Database and Evaluation Methodology for Optical Flow
    Simon Baker, Michael Black, J. P. Lewis, Stefan Roth, Daniel Scharstein, Richard Szeliski
    International Conference on Computer Vision, 2007

  • Shape Priors by Kernel Density Modeling of PCA Residual Structure
    J. P. Lewis, Iman Mostafavi, GIna Sosinsky, Maryanne E. Martone, Ruth West
    IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 2007