It was pretty interesting stuff; these guys have done some crazy cool work with making fabric and skin look amazingly real. Hyper-real, in fact -- the guy who was talking about fabric modeling pointed out that there were several instances where the fabric they were modeling wouldn't have worked in real life. For example, Dexter's four-armed T-shirt would rip right off -- they had to fake the physics and make parts of the material inordinately strong (but only some of the time) for it to work properly.

It was also pretty interesting to hear how much they rely on simulation as an adjunct to hand-animation. Most of the explosions, for example, are simulated instead of animated. The simulation tool is capable of interacting with hand-animated key frames, so you can mix and match (for example, putting jangly bracelets on a hand-animated character's arm), or have the simulated system take over from the animation (for modeling an explosion that inherits the velocities and positions from a hand animation loop). Again, hyper-reality is important -- most of the simulations are augmented by virtual blasts of air and bungie cords to get things to fly out in just the right way.  10:29:12 PM  (comments [])