Fast and deep deformation approximations

Character rigs are procedural systems that compute the shape of an animated character for a given pose. They can be highly complex and must account for bulges, wrinkles, and other aspects of a character's appearance. When comparing film-quality character rigs with those designed for real-time applications, there is typically a substantial and readily apparent difference in the quality of the mesh deformations. Real-time rigs are limited by a computational budget and often trade realism for performance. Rigs for film do not have this same limitation, and character riggers can make the rig as complicated as necessary to achieve realistic deformations. However, increasing the rig complexity slows rig evaluation, and the animators working with it can become less efficient and may experience frustration. In this paper, we present a method to reduce the time required to compute mesh deformations for film-quality rigs, allowing better interactivity during animation authoring and use in real-time games and applications. Our approach learns the deformations from an existing rig by splitting the mesh deformation into linear and nonlinear portions. The linear deformations are computed directly from the transformations of the rig's underlying skeleton. We use deep learning methods to approximate the remaining nonlinear portion. In the examples we show from production rigs used to animate lead characters, our approach reduces the computational time spent on evaluating deformations by a factor of 5×-10×. This significant savings allows us to run the complex, film-quality rigs in real-time even when using a CPU-only implementation on a mobile device

A minimalistic approach for fast computation of geodesic distances on triangular meshes

The computation of geodesic distances is an important research topic in Geometry Processing and 3D Shape Analysis as it is a basic component of many methods used in these areas. In this work, we present a minimalistic parallel algorithm based on front propagation to compute approximate geodesic distances on meshes. Our method is practical and simple to implement and does not require any heavy pre-processing. The convergence of our algorithm depends on the number of discrete level sets around the source points from which distance information propagates. To appropriately implement our method on GPUs taking into account memory coalescence problems, we take advantage of a graph representation based on a breadth-first search traversal that works harmoniously with our parallel front propagation approach. We report experiments that show how our method scales with the size of the problem. We compare the mean error and processing time obtained by our method with such measures computed using other methods. Our method produces results in competitive times with almost the same accuracy, especially for large meshes. We also demonstrate its use for solving two classical geometry processing problems: the regular sampling problem and the Voronoi tessellation on meshes.Comment: Preprint submitted to Computers & Graphic

Automatic modeling of virtual humans and body clothing

Highly realistic virtual human models are rapidly becoming commonplace in computer graphics. These models, often represented by complex shape and requiring labor-intensive process, challenge the problem of automatic modeling. The problem and solutions to automatic modeling of animatable virtual humans are studied. Methods for capturing the shape of real people, parameterization techniques for modeling static shape (the variety of human body shapes) and dynamic shape (how the body shape changes as it moves) of virtual humans are classified, summarized and compared. Finally, methods for clothed virtual humans are reviewe

Capture and Modeling of Non-Linear Heterogeneous Soft Tissue

This paper introduces a data-driven representation and modeling technique for simulating non-linear heterogeneous soft tissue. It simplifies the construction of convincing deformable models by avoiding complex selection and tuning of physical material parameters, yet retaining the richness of non-linear heterogeneous behavior. We acquire a set of example deformations of a real object, and represent each of them as a spatially varying stress-strain relationship in a finite-element model. We then model the material by non-linear interpolation of these stress-strain relationships in strain-space. Our method relies on a simple-to-build capture system and an efficient run-time simulation algorithm based on incremental loading, making it suitable for interactive computer graphics applications. We present the results of our approach for several non-linear materials and biological soft tissue, with accurate agreement of our model to the measured data.Engineering and Applied Science

Automatic generation of dynamic skin deformation for animated characters

© 2018 by the authors. Since non-automatic rigging requires heavy human involvements, and various automatic rigging algorithms are less efficient in terms of computational efficiency, especially for current curve-based skin deformation methods, identifying the iso-parametric curves and creating the animation skeleton requires tedious and time-consuming manual work. Although several automatic rigging methods have been developed, but they do not aim at curve-based models. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a new rigging algorithm for automatic generation of dynamic skin deformation to quickly identify iso-parametric curves and create an animation skeleton in a few milliseconds, which can be seamlessly used in curve-based skin deformation methods to make the rigging process fast enough for highly efficient computer animation applications

Déformation de la peau d'un personnage avec prise en compte des contacts

National audienceLors de l'animation d'un maillage représentant la peau d'un personnage ou d'un animal par exemple, des techniques dites de skinning sont utilisées pour le déformer au niveau des articulations. Bien que très populaires dans l'industrie pour leur très faible coût d'évaluation, les techniques de skinning géométrique comme le LBS (Linear Blending Skinning) ou les dual quaternions, ne permettent pas d'imiter de façon crédible les déformations des membres. Pour mieux capturer le comportement de la peau, d'autres méthodes basées seulement sur le maillage, utilisent des calculs coûteux comme la détection de collisions ou la correction de volume. Toutefois ces approches restent seulement adaptées au rendu hors ligne. Nous présentons la première méthode temps réel produisant une déformation du maillage en prenant en compte le contact de la peau et, éventuellement, le gonflement des muscles. Nous proposons d'utiliser de façon conjointe le maillage et une représentation volumique. Le maillage est approximé avec une surface implicite qui nous permet de le déformer de façon plausible tout en traitant les collisions et en conservant les détails du maillage

Detail-Preserving Controllable Deformation from Sparse Examples

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