Doctor of Philosophy in Computing

dissertationPhysics-based animation has proven to be a powerful tool for creating compelling animations for film and games. Most techniques in graphics are based on methods developed for predictive simulation for engineering applications; however, the goals for graphics applications are dramatically different than the goals of engineering applications. As a result, most physics-based animation tools are difficult for artists to work with, providing little direct control over simulation results. In this thesis, we describe tools for physics-based animation designed with artist needs and expertise in mind. Most materials can be modeled as elastoplastic: they recover from small deformations, but large deformations permanently alter their rest shape. Unfortunately, large plastic deformations, common in graphical applications, cause simulation instabilities if not addressed. Most elastoplastic simulation techniques in graphics rely on a finite-element approach where objects are discretized into a tetrahedral mesh. Using these approaches, maintaining simulation stability during large plastic flows requires remeshing, a complex and computationally expensive process. We introduce a new point-based approach that does not rely on an explicit mesh and avoids the expense of remeshing. Our approach produces comparable results with much lower implementation complexity. Points are a ubiquitous primitive for many effects, so our approach also integrates well with existing artist pipelines. Next, we introduce a new technique for animating stylized images which we call Dynamic Sprites. Artists can use our tool to create digital assets that interact in a natural, but stylized, way in virtual environments. In order to support the types of nonphysical, exaggerated motions often desired by artists, our approach relies on a heavily modified deformable body simulator, equipped with a set of new intuitive controls and an example-based deformation model. Our approach allows artists to specify how the shape of the object should change as it moves and collides in interactive virtual environments. Finally, we introduce a new technique for animating destructive scenes. Our approach is built on the insight that the most important visual aspects of destruction are plastic deformation and fracture. Like with Dynamic Sprites, we use an example-based model of deformation for intuitive artist control. Our simulator treats objects as rigid when computing dynamics but allows them to deform plastically and fracture in between timesteps based on interactions with the other objects. We demonstrate that our approach can efficiently animate the types of destructive scenes common in film and games. These animation techniques are designed to exploit artist expertise to ease creation of complex animations. By using artist-friendly primitives and allowing artists to provide characteristic deformations as input, our techniques enable artists to create more compelling animations, more easily

NASA: Neural Articulated Shape Approximation

Efficient representation of articulated objects such as human bodies is an important problem in computer vision and graphics. To efficiently simulate deformation, existing approaches represent 3D objects using polygonal meshes and deform them using skinning techniques. This paper introduces neural articulated shape approximation (NASA), an alternative framework that enables efficient representation of articulated deformable objects using neural indicator functions that are conditioned on pose. Occupancy testing using NASA is straightforward, circumventing the complexity of meshes and the issue of water-tightness. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NASA for 3D tracking applications, and discuss other potential extensions.Comment: ECCV 202

Putting holes in holey geometry: Topology change for arbitrary surfaces

This paper presents a method for computing topology changes for triangle meshes in an interactive geometric modeling environment. Most triangle meshes in practice do not exhibit desirable geometric properties, so we develop a solution that is independent of standard assumptions and robust to geometric errors. Specifically, we provide the first method for topology change applicable to arbitrary non-solid, non-manifold, non-closed, self-intersecting surfaces. We prove that this new method for topology change produces the expected conventional results when applied to solid (closed, manifold, non-self-intersecting) surfaces---that is, we prove a backwards-compatibility property relative to prior work. Beyond solid surfaces, we present empirical evidence that our method remains tolerant to a variety of surface aberrations through the incorporation of a novel error correction scheme. Finally, we demonstrate how topology change applied to non-solid objects enables wholly new and useful behaviors