Jernej Barbič grew up in a village in northwestern Slovenia, where walks to school through alpine and beech forests stirred an early fascination with motion in nature. That curiosity led him to computer graphics and, eventually, to an Academy Award for technology that makes digital characters move as if they have muscles, fat, and skin beneath the surface.
Now a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Barbič helped create Ziva VFX, a software system launched in 2016 that produces realistic soft-tissue simulations for film and visual effects. The startup behind it, Ziva Dynamics, was co-founded by Barbič and based in Vancouver. Unity Technologies acquired the company in 2021.
Ziva VFX has been used in more than 60 feature films, including Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. For the design and development of the technology, Barbič, an IEEE senior member, received a 2025 technical achievement Academy Award. He called the recognition a tremendous honor because it underscores how computational ideas shape cinematic storytelling as well as science.
Barbič credits his parents for guiding him toward engineering and computing. His father, an engineer who led research at a cement factory and developed a way to use magnetic resonance imaging to test cement integrity, showed him how mathematics and physics can be turned into practical systems. His mother, an elementary school teacher, brought home a ZX Spectrum when he was 8. After copying BASIC programs from the manual, he began modifying them and, by the end of two weeks, had written a game in which a snowman navigated a shifting road.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Ljubljana in 2000, then moved to the United States for doctoral studies in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. His Ph.D. research focused on simulation techniques for deformable objects, work that set the course for his later emphasis on methods that are accurate, fast, and controllable enough for real-world use. After completing his doctorate in 2007, he conducted postdoctoral research at MIT and joined USC as an assistant professor in 2009.
Jernej Barbič and movie-ready simulation
At USC, Barbič built Vega FEM, an open-source platform for simulating deformable 3D objects. Translating that research into tools artists could use became a central theme of his career. In 2011 he met James Jacobs, a creature supervisor at Weta FX in Wellington, New Zealand, who had been using his software for animals and fantastical characters. Weta FX later hosted Barbič for a summer research stint, where he studied production workflows and the technical barriers facing visual effects teams.
He saw a gap in the industry. While surface textures had advanced, the absence of convincing internal anatomy broke the illusion for audiences. Creatures and digital doubles needed bones, muscles, and fat to behave credibly. In 2014, Jacobs approached him about forming a company, and in 2015 they launched Ziva Dynamics to build what became Ziva VFX.
The software employs physics-based simulation to model internal anatomy. It numerically solves the partial differential equations of nonlinear elasticity for musculoskeletal tissues so that muscles contract and bulge, skin stretches and slides, and fat exhibits inertia. Artists construct characters with bones, muscles, soft tissue, and fat, each with material properties, constraints, attachments, and activations. The simulator computes how those elements deform and interact over time, drawing on computational mechanics, finite element methods, numerical optimization, contact handling, and computer graphics.
Because production demands both realism and control, the system was designed to fit into established workflows, allowing artists to direct outcomes, iterate quickly, and integrate simulations with broader pipelines. Among the many characters brought to life with the software, Barbič has singled out King Kong in 2024’s Godzilla vs. Kong for the way muscle shapes and skin dynamics convey the character’s strength.
Following Unity’s acquisition of Ziva Dynamics, Barbič consulted for the company for nearly two years. In 2024, London-based DNEG acquired the exclusive license to Ziva VFX.
Animating the human hand
Alongside industry work, Barbič continues to pursue academic research. With support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, his recent project centers on modeling, simulating, and animating human hands to inform tool design, medical prosthetics, and robotics. He and collaborators created a digital twin of the hand using medical imaging, geometric modeling, finite element methods, and multibody simulation to represent internal structures and motion.
Working with then-USC doctoral candidate Bohan Wang, now an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, and radiologist George Matcuk, the team scanned the hands of four volunteers with MRI across 12 poses to capture how bones, muscles, and fat move. The resulting datasets are publicly available for further study, with potential benefits for medicine and robotics.
IEEE: a bridge across disciplines
Barbič joined IEEE in 2008 when he published work on deformable-object simulation in the inaugural issue of IEEE Transactions on Haptics. He has since authored papers in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, which connected his research to a broader community focused on visual computing and computational methods. He says IEEE recognizes the engineering foundations of computer science and supports interdisciplinary research, a perspective that has guided his service as an associate editor for both journals.
For Barbič, the through line from Slovenian forests to Hollywood blockbusters is the same: using rigorous mathematics and physics to build tools that others can use, whether to animate a cinematic creature or to model the human hand. For more on career development within the organization, see our guide to IEEE senior membership.