In the final battle scene of Incredibles 2, baby Jack-Jack grows into a giant version of himself and inadvertently saves the day. The pivotal moment is one of the many Pixar scenes that Yale professor Theodore Kim helped bring to life with Fizt2, a simulation system that allowed Jack-Jacks clothing to expand with his body.
The SciTech Awards is a separate event from the Oscars ceremony, which was broadcasted on March 12. It honors companies and people who have contributed significantly to the technological advancement of movies.
In his acceptance speech, Kim drew a laugh from the audience when he thanked his former PhD advisor, "for convincing me 20 years ago that rendering is boring and simulation is awesome." The award show's host,"Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings" star Simu Liu, joked that Kims comment could have lead to a slap onstage,a reference to last years Oscars.
The fact that he was paying such close attention to what I said was very interesting, Kim laughed.
Fizt2, whose name stands for physics tool version 2.0, is an improved version of the original Pixar Fizt cloth simulator, Kim said. First used in the 2001 film Monsters Inc. for Boos oversized T-shirt, the simulator would make clothing react to the characters movements the way it would in real life.
However, the physics-based simulator would explode whenever an animated character moved in a physically impossible manner, Kim said, because its governed by the laws of nature.
While working at Pixar from 2015 to 2019 as a senior research scientist, Kim and his colleagues created a system that would simulate the characters bodies underneath as well, allowing for more complex interactions between objects, he said. Kim said the development saves animators from having to tediously edit their models during certain moments.
By giving them the tools that make it so that they don't have to do that anymore, they can actually focus on the performance more instead.
Since then, Fizt2 has been used for the upper half of the Dad character's body in Onward and Buzz Lightyears spacesuit in Lightyear. It has allowed the flaps on sea monsters heads in Luca to ripple in the wind, and for fleshy characters like Mei in Turning Red to move in a realistic way as a red panda.
It has to have that snap to it when she moves, Kim said. Otherwise, it doesn't really look convincing.
Kim was first inspired to go into movie animation when he saw Toy Story in high school and he later earned computer science degrees from Cornell University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In his first job after graduating from Cornell, he made his first screen appearance at an internship for Rhythm and Hues Studios, where he helped bring the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone to life.
Prior to joining Pixar, he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara and developed Wavelet Turbulence, a process that makes explosions look more realistic in movies. The idea earned Kim his first Oscar in 2012.
In 2017, he got his first official screen credit for "Cars 3." Not everyone who works in the visual effects studio gets screen credit, he said, especially when he was an intern.
Five years after I got my first Academy Award, I finally got a screen credit, he said, laughing.
In 2019, he returned to academia at Yale University, where he is a computer science professor and co-leads the Yale Computer Graphics Group.
Kim said working in academia allows him more time to delve into long-term research questions. Since 2020, he has been working on computer graphics algorithms to animate diverse types of hair.
If you look at the algorithms for human hair, it's actually for very straight hair," he said. "Whereas in highly curly hair like Afro-textured hair or kinky hair there's actually never been a computational model that has ever been formulated for this sort of thing, he said. Which we think is a big shortcoming, actually.
He said increasing representation of people of color in the industry is necessary to fix these shortcomings. Most of the SciTech Award recipients he sees at the ceremony are white men, he said. From looking at the photo archives of the SciTech awards, he speculates that his colleague, Audrey Wong, is the only Asian-American woman to ever win a SciTech Oscar.
We would really like to see this shift, because we see the results of this in technologythen the technology becomes very specialized for just one type of human, he said. So the first step to this is, maybe you should talk to your colleagues of color, and maybe include them in the research so that we can actually expand these algorithms to really represent everybody. And I would like to see more of this happen.
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