Jernej Barbic
Title: How To Build a Human: Physics-Based Character Simulation
Physically based soft-tissue simulations can create compelling digital creatures such as humans and animals. I will talk about our physically based simulation work at Ziva Dynamics, a startup company that I co-founded and jointly led as its CTO since 2015, now a part of Unity Technologies. We have created a soft-tissue FEM simulator that can model complex anatomically based creatures. We also invented a machine learning technology that can encode high-quality shapes into real-time deformers, to animate the shape of the character across its range of motion inside game engines and other interactive applications.
Jernej Barbic is a full professor of computer science at USC. He has published over 40 academic publications in top venues in computer graphics and related fields. Jernej is also a co-founder and CTO of a successful computer animation startup company “Ziva Dynamics” (acquired by Unity Technologies), whereby he contributed technical and business leadership on real-time character deformation, anatomically based modeling, nonlinear elasticity and digital humans. In 2014, he was named a Sloan Research Fellow. In 2011, MIT Technology Review named him one of the Top 35 Innovators under the age of 35 in the world (TR35). Jernej is also the author of Vega FEM, a free C/C++ software physics library for deformable object simulation. He received his Ph.D. from CMU, and did postdoctoral research at MIT CSAIL. His interests include computer graphics, animation, interactive physics, haptic rendering, visual effects for film, medical simulation, FEM deformable objects, biomechanics, sound simulation, model reduction and control of nonlinear systems, intellectual property law and startup companies.