Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions

Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions

Application of morphing technique with mesh-merging in rapid hull form generation

ABSTRACTMorphing is a geometric interpolation technique that is often used by the animation industry to transform one form into another seemingly seamlessly. It does this by producing a large number of ‘intermediate’ forms between the two ‘extreme’ or ‘parent’ forms. It has already been shown that morphing technique can be a powerful tool for form design and as such can be a useful addition to the armoury of product designers. Morphing procedure itself is simple and consists of straightforward linear interpolation. However, establishing the correspondence between vertices of the parent models is one of the most difficult and important tasks during a morphing process. This paper discusses the mesh-merging method employed for this process as against the already established mesh-regularising method. It has been found that the merging method minimises the need for manual manipulation, allowing automation to a large extent

Shape Transformation of Multiple Objects Using Slices

3D shape transformation is usually confined to transformation between a pair of objects. The objective of this paper is to look at shape transformation from a different perspective: instead of binding this concept between two objects, the technique is extended to the concept of incorporating the characteristics of a number of objects in one body at a time. Equal number of slices are generated from all objects. Slices may be parallel to each other or each slice may have different orientation. Traversal of a data along its longitudinal direction may generate slices which are differently oriented from each other. When multiple objects are transformed to one and is used as an influence shape, it also works as incorporating multiple influence shapes at a time during transformation between two objects. The paper shows the ease of implementation of this concept in sliced data and also discusses its extendibility

Three-dimensional metamorphosis: a survey

International audienceA metamorphosis or a (3D) morphing is the process of continuously transforming one object into another. 2D and 3D morphing are popular in computer animation, industrial design, and growth simulation. Since there is no intrinsic solution to the morphing problem, user interaction can be a key component of a morphing software. Many morphing techniques have been proposed in recent years for 2D and 3D objects. We present a survey of the various 3D approaches, giving special attention to the user interface. We show how the approaches are intimately related to the object representations. We conclude by sketching some morphing strategies for the future

Large-scale Geometric Data Decomposition, Processing and Structured Mesh Generation

Mesh generation is a fundamental and critical problem in geometric data modeling and processing. In most scientific and engineering tasks that involve numerical computations and simulations on 2D/3D regions or on curved geometric objects, discretizing or approximating the geometric data using a polygonal or polyhedral meshes is always the first step of the procedure. The quality of this tessellation often dictates the subsequent computation accuracy, efficiency, and numerical stability. When compared with unstructured meshes, the structured meshes are favored in many scientific/engineering tasks due to their good properties. However, generating high-quality structured mesh remains challenging, especially for complex or large-scale geometric data. In industrial Computer-aided Design/Engineering (CAD/CAE) pipelines, the geometry processing to create a desirable structural mesh of the complex model is the most costly step. This step is semi-manual, and often takes up to several weeks to finish. Several technical challenges remains unsolved in existing structured mesh generation techniques. This dissertation studies the effective generation of structural mesh on large and complex geometric data. We study a general geometric computation paradigm to solve this problem via model partitioning and divide-and-conquer. To apply effective divide-and-conquer, we study two key technical components: the shape decomposition in the divide stage, and the structured meshing in the conquer stage. We test our algorithm on vairous data set, the results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework. The comparisons also show our algorithm outperforms existing partitioning methods in final meshing quality. We also show our pipeline scales up efficiently on HPC environment

matching, interpolation, and approximation ; a survey

In this survey we consider geometric techniques which have been used to measure the similarity or distance between shapes, as well as to approximate shapes, or interpolate between shapes. Shape is a modality which plays a key role in many disciplines, ranging from computer vision to molecular biology. We focus on algorithmic techniques based on computational geometry that have been developed for shape matching, simplification, and morphing