self portrait

Robert Bridson

Adjunct professor in the Imager and SCL labs, UBC Computer Science
Ph.D. Stanford '03, MMATH Waterloo '99, BMATH Waterloo '98

emailrbridson @ cs.ubc.ca
phone  604-822-1993
office  ICICS/CS X663
mailDept. Computer Science, UBC
201-2366 Main Mall
Vancouver, V6T 1Z4, Canada

Current Position

As of August 2013 I am no longer a full-time professor at UBC, but retain adjunct status. I am not taking on graduate students for supervision. I am now a Senior Principal Research Scientist for Visual Effects at Autodesk.


Symposium on Computer Animation

I helped organize SCA 2011, August 5-7 in Vancouver, just before SIGGRAPH: www.siggraph.org/sca2011


Past Industry Work

I cofounded Exotic Matter AB, a graphics company which made physical simulation software for the film industry. Our Naiad software, acquired by Autodesk in 2012, has featured in some of the most impressive liquid effects to date, including films such as Avatar, Narnia: Voyage of the Dawntreader, X-Men First Class, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and many others. It is currently used at studios around the world.

My official screen credits are for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Adventures of Tintin, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Inkheart, but I have helped write in-house software at studios used in many other films. Most recently I spent ten months as part of R&D at Weta Digital in New Zealand following earlier visits. Before that I co-wrote the Squirt fluid simulator for Double Negative Visual Effects, seen in many films for smoke, water, fire, clouds, ink-in-water, etc. including Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2012, The Boat that Rocked/Pirate Radio, Inkheart, Quantum of Solace, The Dark Knight, and Hell Boy II: The Golden Army. Even further back I helped out with cloth simulation code used for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones at Industrial Light and Magic, as one of the original contributors to the PhysBAM project, under my Ph.D. supervisor Ron Fedkiw.


Animations and Images

animating smoke with a triangle mesh subgrid turbulence modeling for smoke animation accurate viscous free surface liquids animating developable surfaces variational solid-fluid coupling solid/water boundary conditions curl-noise 2d liquids and sand liquid bunny sand bunny 1 sand bunny 2 liquid column sand column double buddha rings cloth twister spinning cloth tablecloth curtain curtain


Books

fluid book cover

Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics, Second Edition, R. Bridson, CRC Press, 2015.


Publications

I've supplied preprints in most cases, which may be missing figures or include typos etc. Please see the publishers' websites for the official versions.


Other Publications


My Group

Current:

Past:


Downloads

All files in this section are in the public domain unless otherwise indicated.

Many of my or my group's projects use a variety of files from a "common" directory: not exactly a proper library, but a collection of occasionally very useful files for C++ hacking. Some of the more stable members are available in the public domain here:

Here are some more specific projects, organized by topic:


Teaching

Current/Upcoming courses:

I have taught in the past: