Martin Guay



I am a Tech Lead / Research Scientist at Disney Research advancing motion capture and animation using AI and deep learning. In 2018, I established markerless motion capture capabilities called synth2track, which is spirirtually the neural successor to iMocap at ILM for match animation. Recently, I established motion completion tools for key-framing animation at Pixar.

Prior to this, I pioneered embodied conversational characters that understand their environment and can speak with people. Characters can recognize things, walk around and interact with the world realistically, play musical instruments, and build rapport via conversation, 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


Cloth


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
PaperVideo



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



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



AI Characters: Environment-aware Embodied Conversational Avatars in Augmented Reality, 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
PaperVideo



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.