I am currently working at 3Gear Systems, a small startup focused on hand tracking for gestural user interfaces. Prior to that, I spent four years as an R&D Engineer at Industrial Light & Magic, where I worked on deformable and rigid simulation, fluid surfacing, and assorted other topics. I finished my Ph.D in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department in 2008, where I was advised by Doug James and worked in the graphics group. I completed my undergraduate in 2002 at the University of Washington with a dual degree in comprehensive math and computer science, where I worked with Steven Seitz and Zoran Popović. While at the UW, I played snare drum in the marching band, TAed several graphics courses, and was involved in the production of the animated film The Last Lift (available from UWCSE's video page). More recently, in addition to my research, I was involved in the production of a different short film that appeared at SIGGRAPH, designed the lab web site, and was the drummer in the now-defunct all-grad-student dance band “No One Has To Know” (a.k.a. N1H2K). While not working, I enjoy cooking, climbing, squash, skiing, cycling, backpacking, photography, and drumming.

Research

ACM Digital Library links courtesy the ACM authorizer service.

Optimization for sag-free simulations
Christopher D. Twigg and Zoran Kačić-Alesić
ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2011. [ACM digital library]

Point Cloud Glue: Constraining simulations using the Procrustes transform
Christopher D. Twigg and Zoran Kačić-Alesić
ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2010. [ACM digital library] [EG digital library] [PDF]

Waterbending: Water Effects on The Last Airbender
Ian Sachs, Christopher D. Twigg, Lee Uren, Dan Pearson, and Nick Rasmussen
ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Talks

Controlling Multibody Dynamics via Browsing and Time Reversal
Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University

Backwards Steps in Rigid Body Simulation
Christopher D. Twigg and Doug L. James
ACM SIGGRAPH 2008. [project] [ACM digital library]

Many-Worlds Browsing for Control of Multibody Dynamics
Christopher D. Twigg and Doug L. James
ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 [project] [ACM digital library]

Mesh Ensemble Motion Graphs: Data-driven mesh animation with constraints
Doug L. James, Christopher D. Twigg, Andrew A. Cove, and Robert Y. Wang
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 26, Issue 4 (October 2007) [project] [ACM digital library]

Skinning Mesh Animations
Doug L. James and Christopher D. Twigg
ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 [project] [ACM digital library]

Squashing cubes: automating deformable model construction for graphics
Doug L. James, Jernej Barbič, and Christopher D. Twigg
ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Sketches [project] [ACM digital library]

Estimating Cloth Simulation Parameters from Video
Kiran S. Bhat, Christopher D. Twigg, Jessica K. Hodgins, Pradeep K. Khosla, Zoran Popović, and Steven M. Seitz
ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2003 [project] [ACM digital library] [EG digital library]

Film credits

Teaching

Courses I've TAed:

• 15-864 Advanced Computer Graphics (Spring 2004, Carnegie Mellon)
• 15-462 Computer Graphics I (Spring 2003, Carnegie Mellon)
• CSE591 PMP Graphics (Spring 2002, University of Washington)
• CSE457 Undergraduate Graphics (Autumn 2001, University of Washington)
• CSE591 PMP Graphics (Spring 2001, University of Washington)

Software

• Many-Worlds Browsing demo. Source code here.
• Mesh Ensemble Motion Graphs data and viewer + source
• Skinning Mesh Animations demo + data
• rps/rwho for querying remote computers
• Software for generating a graphics-lab-style publications page out of a single BiBTeX file.

Other

Graphics portfolio. Images from stuff I worked on during undergrad.

Photography. I've finally entered the digital age and you can find all my pictures on flickr. See also my panorama work.

Links

Graphics links

• SIGGRAPH 2011 papers online
• Older SIGGRAPH and SCA papers
• graphbib
• OpenGL camera model (by Song Ho Ahn)

Programming links

• Boost C++ library
• SGI STL
• wxWidgets docs (the best free cross-platform widget toolkit)
• Python library reference

Pittsburgh links

Fall 2002 - Spring 2008

• The Climbing Wall: Hey, they finally updated their website from that horrible Java thing!
• The Kretschmann Farm: Local organic produce, delivered to your neighborhood
• Pittsburgh weather
• Pittsburgh driving tutorial courtesy Ryan Kelly
• All-Clad Metalcrafters has a factory just outside Pittsburgh and holds a factory seconds sale twice a year, in December and May. I used to be on their mailing list but I don't seem to any more, so you should contact them directly if you want notification.
• Pittsburgh Free Ride, a very cool all-volunteer organization dedicated to spreading cycling through DIY repair work and other service.

San Francisco links

Spring 2008 - ?

Chronicle / Frederic Larson

• San Francisco weather. What was that you say? Fog, in the Sunset District? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!
• SF has only one 80s night that I know about, at Cat Club, conveniently located on the N Owl route, but inconveniently on Thursday nights; not so good for us working stiffs. Why is Thursday considered International Standard 80s Night?
• Planet Granite recently opened swanky new digs some 5 minutes from ILM World Headquarters.
• I would argue that Google Transit has now surpassed 511 Trip Planner. But shouldn't you be riding your fixie or something?