Oscar Winner Jernej Barbič Brings Monsters to Life

While walking to school as a child, Jernej Barbič would marvel at how beautiful his home was. He was born and raised in a picturesque village in northwestern Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia), located in the European Alps. Surrounded by alpine and beech trees, Barbic dreamed of replicating their swaying in the wind for others to enjoy.At the time, he didn’t have the tools or the knowledge to create a system that could do that, but it sparked his interest in computer graphics, he says. Jernej Barbič Employer University of Southern California, in Los AngelesTitle Professor of computer scienceMember grade Senior memberAlma maters University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia; Carnegie MellonTwenty years later, in 2016, Barbič, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, made his mark. His Ziva VFX software system allows for the creation of realistic muscle, fat, and skin simulations for 3D digital humans and creatures.The technology was launched in 2016 by a startup he helped found, Ziva Dynamics, headquartered in Vancouver. It was acquired in 2021 by Unity Technologies of San Francisco.Ziva VFX has been used in more than 60 movies including Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom; Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.For the design and development of Ziva VFX, Barbič, an IEEE senior member, received a 2025 technical achievement Academy Award. It was a “tremendous honor,” he says, as the award recognizes technologies that have had a significant impact on motion picture production.“Computer graphics and simulation can sometimes feel like a specialized technical field,” he says, “but the award showed that these ideas affect not just science but also art and how stories are told on screen.“The digital characters enabled by mathematics become important parts of people’s lives.”Sparking an interest in computer graphicsBarbič says he was inspired to pursue engineering by his father, an engineer who headed a cement factory’s research department and invented a technology that uses magnetic resonance imaging to test the integrity of cement. His father’s work showed him that “mathematics and physics are beautiful on their own, but engineering lets you build something that other people can use,” he says.It was Barbič’s mother, an elementary school teacher, who introduced him to computer science. When he was 8 years old, the school his mother taught at bought a ZX Spectrum computer. With permission from the principal, she brought it home for her son to play on for two weeks. But he didn’t just play games; he created his own game using the BASIC programming language.The machine came with a booklet that contained instructions on how to write a computer program, he says.“At first,” he says, “I copied them verbatim without understanding what they did. But then I started realizing there is structure, and I modified the instructions.” Of all the creatures brought to life using his technology, Barbič is particularly enamored with King Kong from 2024’s Godzilla vs. Kong.DNEG/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc./LegendaryBy the end of the two weeks, he’d developed a computer game where players guided a snowman along a winding road. It shifted unpredictably to the left or right, and players accumulated points by remaining on the road for as long as possible.Barbič went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 2000 from the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia. The following year, he moved to the United States to begin a doctoral program in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. It was a major turning point in his life, he says.His doctoral research focused on developing simulation methods for objects that can change their shape when an outside force is applied to them, known as “deformable objects.”That project shaped much of his later research, he says: “I became interested not only in making simulations accurate but also in making them practical: fast enough, robust enough, and controllable enough to be used in real applications.”After earning his Ph.D. in computer science in 2007, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Two years later, he joined USC as an assistant professor.Making movie magic possibleIt was at USC that Barbič merged his passion for computer science with film. He developed Vega FEM, an open-source software program that allowed people to animate realistic 3D deformable objects. But Vega FEM was narrow in scope and not exactly what filmmakers needed, he says, so he started exploring how to create a version suitable for the movie industry.“A major theme of my career has been the translation of research ideas into practical tools,” he says. “Academic research often produces beautiful algorithms, but it can be difficult to make those algorithms usable by artists, engineers, or production teams. I have always been interested in that bridge: taking rigorous computational methods and turning them into systems that people can actually use.”In 2011 he attended an Association for Computing Machinery conference presented by its Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGraph). There he met James Jacobs, the creature supervisor at visual effects company Weta FX of Wellington, New Zealand. The company is behind the effects in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and other movies. Jacobs used Barbič’s software to create animals and fantastical creatures.Two years later, Weta FX offered Barbič a summerlong research position in New Zealand. He accepted and spent the time studying the process of creating visual effects and learning what roadblocks existed in the film industry, he says.At the time, the technology to create realistic soft-tissue and anatomical simulation for digital characters didn’t exist.“The visual effects industry had reached a point where surface-level realism was not enough,” Barbič says.

Muscles should bulge and contract, skin should stretch and slide, fat should have inertia, and tissue should respond to motion and impact.” In an effort to solve the problem Jacobs in 2014 approached Barbič about founding a startup. In 2015 they launched Ziva Dynamics, where they began what is now Ziva VFX.The software uses physics-based simulations to model the internal anatomy of a character. It numerically solves the partial differential equations of nonlinear elasticity for musculoskeletal human and creature tissues, Barbič says. The equations describe how muscles, fat, skin, and connective tissue deform, interact with bones, and connect, and how muscles activate.

The simulator then computes how they deform and interact over time.The technology uses ideas from computational mechanics, finite element methods, numerical optimization, contact handling, and computer graphics, Barbič says. Finite element simulation, a method used to predict how a product or structure reacts to heat and other real-world forces, provides a way to model deformable materials volumetrically, not just as surfaces, he says.