Research
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.
Our Research group is interested in creating a local innovation ecosystem around new technologies relevant to the VFX industry and seeing like-minded NZ companies succeed internationally. If you are interested in making contact with us regarding commercial or technical opportunities please email us at
Jump to: 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007
Recent Publications
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Out-Of-Core Computations of High-Resolution Level Sets by Means of Code Transformation
Brian Christensen, Michael Nielsen & Ken Museth
Journal of Scientific Computing (2012) -
A Blendshape Model that Incorporates Physical Interaction
Wan-Chun Ma, Yi-Hau Wang, Graham Fyffe, Bing-Yu Chen, and Paul Debevec.
Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds (Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents, Singapore, 2012) -
A Facial Composite Editor for Blendshape Characters
Wan-Chun Ma, Marco Barbati, J.P. Lewis
ACM Digital Production Symposium 2012 -
Synthesizing Waves from Animated Height Fields
Michael B. Nielsen, Andreas Söderström, Robert Bridson
ACM Transactions on Graphics 2012 -
Polynomial Optics: A Construction Kit for Efficient Ray-Tracing of Lens Systems
Matthias B. Hullin, Johannes Hanika and Wolfgang Heidrich
Computer Graphics Forum / Proceedings of EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) 2012 -
Camera Space Volumetric Shadows
Martin Hill, Luca Fascione, Johannes Hanika, Peter Hillman
Digital Production Symposium (DigiPro) 2012 -
Spacetime Expression Cloning for Blendshapes
Yeongho Seol, J.P. Lewis, Jaewoo Seo, Byungkuk Choi, Ken Anjyo, Junyong Noh
ACM Transactions on Graphics (2012) -
Is there a Universal Image Generator?
Cris Calude and J.P.Lewis
Applied Mathematics and Computation (2012)
2011
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An Energy-Conserving Hair Reflectance Model
Eugene D'Eon, Guillaume Francois, Martin Hill, Joe Letteri and Jean-Marie Aubry
Eurographics Syposium on Rendering 2011 -
Compression and Direct Manipulation of Complex Blendshape Models
Jaewoo Seo, Geoffrey Irving, J.P. Lewis, Junyong Noh,
SIGGRAPH ASIA 2011. -
Artist Friendly Facial Animation Retargeting
Yeongho Seol, Jaewoo Seo, Paul Hyunjin Kim, J.P. Lewis, Junyong Noh,
ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA, 2011. -
Guide Shapes for High Resolution Naturalistic Liquid Simulation
Michael Nielsen & Robert Bridson
ACM Transactions on Graphics Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2011 -
A Quantized-Diffusion Model for Rendering Translucent Materials
Eugene d'Eon & Geoffrey Irving
ACM Transactions on Graphics Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2011 -
Edge-Aware Inpainting using Oriented (Bi)Harmonic Interpolation
J.P. Lewis & Sebastian Sylwan, CGI 2011
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Compression and Direct Manipulation of Complex Blendshape Models
Jaewoo Seo, Geoffrey Irving, J.P. Lewis, Junyong Noh,
SIGGRAPH ASIA 2011. -
RBF Interpolation and Gaussian Process Regression through an RKHS Formulation
Ken Anjyo and John Lewis,
JMI Volume 3, 2011 -
Is there a Universal Image Synthesizer?
Cris Calude & J.P. Lewis
Applied Mathematics and Computation vol 218, #16, 2012. -
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
2010
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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 & Nebojsa Dragosavac
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
2009
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Identifying Salient Points
J.P. Lewis & Ken Anjyo
SIGGRAPH Asia, 2009 Sketches
2008
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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
2007
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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