3D Character Modeling in Virtual Reality

The paper presents a virtual reality modeling system based on interactive web technologies. The system's goal is to provide a user-friendly virtual environment for the development of 3D characters with an articulated structure. The interface allows the modeling of both the character's joint structure (the hierarchy) and its segment geometry (the skin). The novelty of the system consists of (1) the combination of web technologies used (VRML, Java and EAI) which provides the possibility of online modeling, (2) rules and constraints based operations and thus interface elements, (3) vertices and sets of vertices used as graphics primitives and (4) the possibility to handle and extend hierarchies based on the H-anim structure elements

A motion system for social and animated robots

This paper presents an innovative motion system that is used to control the motions and animations of a social robot. The social robot Probo is used to study Human-Robot Interactions (HRI), with a special focus on Robot Assisted Therapy (RAT). When used for therapy it is important that a social robot is able to create an "illusion of life" so as to become a believable character that can communicate with humans. The design of the motion system in this paper is based on insights from the animation industry. It combines operator-controlled animations with low-level autonomous reactions such as attention and emotional state. The motion system has a Combination Engine, which combines motion commands that are triggered by a human operator with motions that originate from different units of the cognitive control architecture of the robot. This results in an interactive robot that seems alive and has a certain degree of "likeability". The Godspeed Questionnaire Series is used to evaluate the animacy and likeability of the robot in China, Romania and Belgium

Posing 3D Models from Drawing

Inferring the 3D pose of a character from a drawing is a complex and under-constrained problem. Solving it may help automate various parts of an animation production pipeline such as pre-visualisation. In this paper, a novel way of inferring the 3D pose from a monocular 2D sketch is proposed. The proposed method does not make any external assumptions about the model, allowing it to be used on different types of characters. The inference of the 3D pose is formulated as an optimisation problem and a parallel variation of the Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm called PARAC-LOAPSO is utilised for searching the minimum. Testing in isolation as well as part of a larger scene, the presented method is evaluated by posing a lamp, a horse and a human character. The results show that this method is robust, highly scalable and is able to be extended to various types of models

Sketch-based character prototyping by deformation

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