Fidelity metrics for animation

In this talk, the problem of evaluating the fidelity of animations will be addressed. The concept of plausible simulation has recently be receiving much attention, and I will present a review of this field and discuss how perceptual metrics are necessary to ensure that such animations are truly perceived as real. Then, our recent work in the development of such metrics will be presented. This includes investigations into the perception of collisions and, more recently, psychophysical experiments that examined human sensitivity to dynamic anomalies, leading to the first steps to developing a metric to evaluate the visual fidelity of physically - based animations. Finally, the efforts to develop perceptual metrics for other types of animation, including multi-modal systems and character animation, will also be discusse

Learning an Intrinsic Garment Space for Interactive Authoring of Garment Animation

Authoring dynamic garment shapes for character animation on body motion is one of the fundamental steps in the CG industry. Established workflows are either time and labor consuming (i.e., manual editing on dense frames with controllers), or lack keyframe-level control (i.e., physically-based simulation). Not surprisingly, garment authoring remains a bottleneck in many production pipelines. Instead, we present a deep-learning-based approach for semi-automatic authoring of garment animation, wherein the user provides the desired garment shape in a selection of keyframes, while our system infers a latent representation for its motion-independent intrinsic parameters (e.g., gravity, cloth materials, etc.). Given new character motions, the latent representation allows to automatically generate a plausible garment animation at interactive rates. Having factored out character motion, the learned intrinsic garment space enables smooth transition between keyframes on a new motion sequence. Technically, we learn an intrinsic garment space with an motion-driven autoencoder network, where the encoder maps the garment shapes to the intrinsic space under the condition of body motions, while the decoder acts as a differentiable simulator to generate garment shapes according to changes in character body motion and intrinsic parameters. We evaluate our approach qualitatively and quantitatively on common garment types. Experiments demonstrate our system can significantly improve current garment authoring workflows via an interactive user interface. Compared with the standard CG pipeline, our system significantly reduces the ratio of required keyframes from 20% to 1 -- 2%

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

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

A Survey of Ocean Simulation and Rendering Techniques in Computer Graphics

This paper presents a survey of ocean simulation and rendering methods in computer graphics. To model and animate the ocean's surface, these methods mainly rely on two main approaches: on the one hand, those which approximate ocean dynamics with parametric, spectral or hybrid models and use empirical laws from oceanographic research. We will see that this type of methods essentially allows the simulation of ocean scenes in the deep water domain, without breaking waves. On the other hand, physically-based methods use Navier-Stokes Equations (NSE) to represent breaking waves and more generally ocean surface near the shore. We also describe ocean rendering methods in computer graphics, with a special interest in the simulation of phenomena such as foam and spray, and light's interaction with the ocean surface

Real-Time Character Rise Motions

This paper presents an uncomplicated dynamic controller for generating physically-plausible three-dimensional full-body biped character rise motions on-the-fly at run-time. Our low-dimensional controller uses fundamental reference information (e.g., center-of-mass, hands, and feet locations) to produce balanced biped get-up poses by means of a real-time physically-based simulation. The key idea is to use a simple approximate model (i.e., similar to the inverted-pendulum stepping model) to create continuous reference trajectories that can be seamlessly tracked by an articulated biped character to create balanced rise-motions. Our approach does not use any key-framed data or any computationally expensive processing (e.g., offline-optimization or search algorithms). We demonstrate the effectiveness and ease of our technique through example (i.e., a biped character picking itself up from different laying positions)