Bond: USD-Integrated Hybrid CPU, GPU Deformation System

Abstract

We introduce Bond, a proprietary deformation system able to load geometry data directly from Pixar™ Universal Scene Description (USD) and to compute complex deformation chains on the GPU using NVIDIA® CUDA®. Bond also integrates tightly with Autodesk Maya®. This system follows on from our work to integrate USD into our animation pipeline [Baillet et al. 2018]. Bond has been used to deform all characters and props on the Peter Rabbit 2 movie’s 1300 shots to achieve high frame rate during playback and rig interaction.