Martin Guay

I am a Tech Lead / Research Scientist at Disney Research leading advancements in motion capture and animation using deep learning. In 2018, I established actor tracking capabilities (called synth2track), which is now used at ILM for match anim, and recently established motion completion tools for key-framing which is used at Pixar for layout.

Prior to this, I pioneered embodied conversational characters that people can speak with you and also understand their environment in augmented reality. They can speak with you, recognize things, walk around and interact with the world realistically, play musical instruments, and build rapport via imitation and more.

List of Publications

Factorized Motion Diffusion for Precise and Character-Agnostic Motion Inbetweening, Motion in Games 2024. (Best Paper Award)
Justin Studer, Dhruv Agrawal, Dominik Borer, Seyedmorteza Sadat, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay, Jakob Buhmann

Skel-Betweener: a Neural Motion Rig for Interactive Motion Authoring SIGGRAPH Asia 2024.
Dhruv Agrawal, Jakob Buhmann, Dominik Borer, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay

Skel-IK: Pose and Skeleton Aware Neural IK , SIGGRAPH Asia 2023.
Dhruv Agrawal, Dominik Borer, Jakob Buhmann, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay

Trajectory Augmentation for Robust Neural Locomotion Controllers , VISIGRAPH 2024, (Best Paper Award).
Dhruv Agrawal, Mattias Koenig, Dominik Borer, Jakob Buhmann, Robert W. Sumber, Martin Guay

Generalized Pose Space Embeddings for Training in the Wild using Anaylis-by-Synthesis, arxiv 2022.
Dominik Borer, Jakob Buhmann, Martin Guay

Augmenting Cats and Dogs, (VISIGRAPP), 2021.
D. Borer, N. Isik, J. Buhmann, M. Guay

Techniques for Inferring Three-Dimensional Poses From Two-Dimensional Images, US Patent 2019.
Jakob Buhmann, Dominik Borer, Martin Guay

High Resolution Rig-space Neural Rendering, arxiv 2019.
Dominik Borer, Jakob Buhmann, Martin Guay

AR Costumes: Automatically Augmenting Watertight Costumes from a single RGB Image, VRCAI 2018.
Christoph Maurhofer, Gokcen Cimen, Mattia Ryffel, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay
Paper Video

AR Poser: Automatically Augmenting Mobile Pictures with Digital Avatars Imitating Poses, CGVCVIP) 2018.
Gokcen Cimen, Christoph Maurhofer, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay
Paper Video

Modeling Physical Interactions with Real World Objects:
Interacting with Intelligent Characters in AR, Workshop on AI in VR and AR, 2017.
Gokcen Cimen, Ye Yuan, Stelian Coros, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay

Scalable Animation of Conversational Embodied AI Avatars, CGVCVIP 2018.
Dominik Borer, Dominic Lutz, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay

Embodied Conversational AI Avatar that Knows the Environement in AR, 2016.
David Niggli, Steven Poulakos, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay

Keys-to-sim: animation to simulation using stochastic optimization, CGVC 2018.
Dominic Borer, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay
Paper Video Online Policy Learning PDF Online Policy Video

Automatic Quadruped Animation on Lion King Previs, US Patent 2017.
Ye Yuan, Moritz Geilinger, Stelian Coros, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay

Exploring AR and VR interactions with a fully Simulated SIMBICON 3D Character, CG and Games, 2018.
Dominic Borer, Simone Giguarri, Robert W. Sumner, Martin Guay

Using Model-based Inverse Dynamics for live-Pupetteering a 3D Character with a Tail, CGVCVIP, 2017.
Gokcen Cimen, Martin Guay, Stelian Coros, Robert W. Sumner

Learning an Interpretable Space for Walking Motion using a Variational Autoencoder, CGVCVIP 2016.
Marcel Ludi, Martin Guay, Brian McWilliams, Robert W. Sumner

Virtual Band Plays any Song on Demand for a Live Karaoke using IK-driven Motion Editing to Match Midi Signals at SCA 2016.
Renzo Roth & CGL Ph.D. Students, Martin Guay

Authoring Motion Cycles, SCA 2017.
Loïc Ciccone, Martin Guay, Mauri Nitti, Robert W. Sumner

Flow Curves: an Intuitive Interface for Coherent Scene Deformation, Pacific Graphics 2016.
Loïc Ciccone, Martin Guay, Robert W. Sumner

Space-time sketching of character animation, SIGGRAPH 2015.
Martin Guay, Remi Ronfard, Michael Gleicher, Marie-Paule Cani

Adding dynamics to sketch-based character animation, SBIM 2015.
Martin Guay, Remi Ronfard, Michael Gleicher, Marie-Paule Cani

The Line of Action: an Intuitive Interface for Expressive Character Posing, SIGGRAPH Asia 2013.
Martin Guay, Marie-Paule Cani, Remi Ronfard

Simple rasterization-based liquids, GPU PRo 5, 2013.
Martin Guay

Screen space animation of fire, SIGGRAPH Asia, 2011.
Martin Guay, Fabrice Colin, Richard Egli

Simple and Fast Fluids, GPU Pro 2, 2011.
Martin Guay, Fabrice Colin, Richard Egli

Multi-dimensional Unconditionally Stable Alternate Direction Explict (ADE) Scheme for the Convection-Diffusion Equation, Conference on Nonlinear Wave Phenomena, 2010.
Martin Guay, Fabrice Colin, Richard Egli

Video Games

A Game of Thrones: Genesis (PC)
PC, C++ at Cyanide Studio Montreal, 2011.

iSurf on iPhone
iOS, C++ at Cyanide Studio Montreal, 2010.

Blood Bowl
XBox 360, C++ at Cyanide Studio Montreal, 2009.