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Meng "Alice" Yu      

Engineering Manager at Airbnb; Former Software Engineer at Pixar & Slack

Meng Yu joined Pixar Animation Studios in August 2006 as a software engineer and effects artist. Her first project was Disney*Pixar's Academy Award®-winning feature, Up, for which she helped develop animation and pipeline tools. After completing work on Up, Yu went to work on Toy Story 3, and was responsible for the creation of the cloth tailoring pipeline for the film, as well as shot simulation and effects. She received a special film credit "3D cloth technology development" for her contribution to cloth modelling. Yu worked on cloth and hair simulation on Pixar's feature film Brave, 2012.

Yu was born and raised in Beijing, China and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for college. She received a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. Yu currently resides in San Francisco.

Speech Topics

The talk will show how mathematics and science can be applied to achieve artistic goals in Pixar's movies. Specifically, Meng will talk about simulating the movement of hair and cloth in computer animation realistically but with artistic controls, and how cloth and hair models have been evolved from film to film depending on the stories and the character styles. She will tell stories of how we achieved creating all Ken's outfits with many details but still relatively quickly on Toy Story 3, and show examples of effects that looked difficult but were easy to make and simple shots that turned out hard.

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