Animating Human Muscle Structure

Graphical simulations of human muscle motion and deformation are of great interest to medical education. In this article, the authors present a technique for simulating muscle deformations by combining physically and geometrically based computations to reduce computation cost and produce fast, accurate simulations

Improvements on a simple muscle-based 3D face for realistic facial expressions

Facial expressions play an important role in face-to-face communication. With the development of personal computers capable of rendering high quality graphics, computer facial animation has produced more and more realistic facial expressions to enrich human-computer communication. In this paper, we present a simple muscle-based 3D face model that can produce realistic facial expressions in real time. We extend Waters' (1987) muscle model to generate bulges and wrinkles and to improve the combination of multiple muscle actions. In addition, we present techniques to reduce the computation burden on the muscle mode

Fast Simulation of Skin Sliding

Skin sliding is the phenomenon of the skin moving over underlying layers of fat, muscle and bone. Due to the complex interconnections between these separate layers and their differing elasticity properties, it is difficult to model and expensive to compute. We present a novel method to simulate this phenomenon at real--time by remeshing the surface based on a parameter space resampling. In order to evaluate the surface parametrization, we borrow a technique from structural engineering known as the force density method which solves for an energy minimizing form with a sparse linear system. Our method creates a realistic approximation of skin sliding in real--time, reducing texture distortions in the region of the deformation. In addition it is flexible, simple to use, and can be incorporated into any animation pipeline

Real Time Animation of Virtual Humans: A Trade-off Between Naturalness and Control

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation techniques. We discuss several aspects of motion naturalness and show how it can be evaluated. We conclude by showing the promise of combinations of different animation paradigms to enhance both naturalness and control

Control system software, simulation, and robotic applications

All essential existing capabilities needed to create a man-machine interaction dynamics and performance (MMIDAP) capability are reviewed. The multibody system dynamics software program Order N DISCOS will be used for machine and musculo-skeletal dynamics modeling. The program JACK will be used for estimating and animating whole body human response to given loading situations and motion constraints. The basic elements of performance (BEP) task decomposition methodologies associated with the Human Performance Institute database will be used for performance assessment. Techniques for resolving the statically indeterminant muscular load sharing problem will be used for a detailed understanding of potential musculotendon or ligamentous fatigue, pain, discomfort, and trauma. The envisioned capacity is to be used for mechanical system design, human performance assessment, extrapolation of man/machine interaction test data, biomedical engineering, and soft prototyping within a concurrent engineering (CE) system

WALL-E’s world: animating Badiou’s philosophy

This article illustrates the philosophy of Alain Badiou through Pixar’s 2008 animation ‘WALL-E’. The fictional story tells of a toxic planet Earth long abandoned following an ecological disaster. Humanity now exists in a floating brave new world; a spaceship whose passengers’ everyday existence is drowned by a consumptive slumber. That is, until a robot named WALL-E comes aboard and changes things forever. The purpose of making this connection between philosophy and film is not to trivialize Badiou’s work, but rather to open it up, pull it apart, and synchronize it with a movie that is saturated with Badiouian themes. Beneath the complexities of Being and Event’s set-theory and the Logics of Worlds’ algebra, lay a set of ideas that are fizzing with creativity and disruptive potential. WALL-E gives these political and philosophical ideas a lived expression to a wide audience. The central motif of the article is that the finitude of appearance in a world is constantly overrun by the infinitude of being, and this requires a new theorization of site-based geographies. From the miraculous discovery of a plant growing on a dead Earth, to the tumultuous arrival of WALL-E onboard a spaceship that he never belonged to, the stability of a world is always threatened by a ‘point of excess’, called the site. Three interrelated concepts of Badiou’s will be animated in this article: atonic and tensed worlds, sites, and subjects

Creative tools for producing realistic 3D facial expressions and animation

Creative exploration of realistic 3D facial animation is a popular but very challenging task due to the high level knowledge and skills required. This forms a barrier for creative individuals who have limited technical skills but wish to explore their creativity in this area. This paper proposes a new technique that facilitates users’ creative exploration by hiding the technical complexities of producing facial expressions and animation. The proposed technique draws on research from psychology, anatomy and employs Autodesk Maya as a use case by developing a creative tool, which extends Maya’s Blend Shape Editor. User testing revealed that novice users in the creative media, employing the proposed tool can produce rich and realistic facial expressions that portray new interesting emotions. It reduced production time by 25% when compared to Maya and by 40% when compared to 3DS Max equivalent tools

A survey of real-time crowd rendering

In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real-time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level-of-detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon-based, point-based, and image-based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo-instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key-pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

THREE DIMENSIONAL MODELING AND ANIMATION OF FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

Facial expression and animation are important aspects of the 3D environment featuring human characters. These animations are frequently used in many kinds of applications and there have been many efforts to increase the realism. Three aspects are still stimulating active research: the detailed subtle facial expressions, the process of rigging a face, and the transfer of an expression from one person to another. This dissertation focuses on the above three aspects. A system for freely designing and creating detailed, dynamic, and animated facial expressions is developed. The presented pattern functions produce detailed and animated facial expressions. The system produces realistic results with fast performance, and allows users to directly manipulate it and see immediate results. Two unique methods for generating real-time, vivid, and animated tears have been developed and implemented. One method is for generating a teardrop that continually changes its shape as the tear drips down the face. The other is for generating a shedding tear, which is a kind of tear that seamlessly connects with the skin as it flows along the surface of the face, but remains an individual object. The methods both broaden CG and increase the realism of facial expressions. A new method to automatically set the bones on facial/head models to speed up the rigging process of a human face is also developed. To accomplish this, vertices that describe the face/head as well as relationships between each part of the face/head are grouped. The average distance between pairs of vertices is used to place the head bones. To set the bones in the face with multi-density, the mean value of the vertices in a group is measured. The time saved with this method is significant. A novel method to produce realistic expressions and animations by transferring an existing expression to a new facial model is developed. The approach is to transform the source model into the target model, which then has the same topology as the source model. The displacement vectors are calculated. Each vertex in the source model is mapped to the target model. The spatial relationships of each mapped vertex are constrained