SCA Early Career Researcher Award

Kui Wu
Principal Researcher
LightSpeed Studios, Tencent America

To recognize his significant contributions in physics-based simulation, specifically in differentiable and high-performance GPU simulation.

SCA Doctoral Dissertation Award

Deep Learning for Character Control
- Sebastian Starke

The award-winning dissertation presents creative neural network solutions that create realistic character animations from motion capture data following user input.

Best Paper Award

Lifted Curls: A Model for Tightly Coiled Hair Simulation

Authors: Alvin Shi, Haomiao Wu, Jarred Parr, A.M. Darke and Theodore Kim

This paper presents a drastically more stable hyper elastic energy model for simulating tightly coiled hair with impressive visual results. It enables the simulation of a new hair style with deep mathematical insights and unprecedented numerical stability.

Best Paper Honorable Mentions

Towards Realtime: A Hybrid Physics-based Method for Hair Animation on GPU

Authors: Li Huang, Fan Yang, Chendi Wei, Yu Ju Chen, Chun Yuan and Ming Gao

This paper presents an elaborate system for real time GPU simulations of human hair with impressive results. Its efficient implementation of a direct sparse solver on the GPU could benefit many areas in computer animation and simulation.

HDHumans: A Hybrid Approach for High-fidelity Digital Humans

Authors: Marc Habermann, Lingjie Liu, Weipeng Xu, Gerard Pons-Moll, Michael Zollhoefer and Christian Theobalt

This paper generates photo-realistic humans in motion from arbitrary viewpoints by combining surface deformation and neural radiance fields. It achieves appealing results with a well thought out hybrid geometry pipeline.