651 research outputs found
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
Automatic Cage Construction for Retargeted Muscle Fitting
The animation of realistic characters necessitates the construction of complicated anatomical structures such as muscles, which allow subtle shape variation of the character's outer surface to be displayed believably. Unfortunately despite numerous efforts, the modelling of muscle structures is still left for an animator who has to painstakingly build up piece by piece, making it a very tedious process. What is even more frustrating is the animator has to build the same muscle structure for every new character. We propose a muscle retargeting technique to help an animator to automatically construct a muscle structure by reusing an already built and tested model (the template model). Our method defines a spatial transfer between the template model and a new model based on the skin surface and the rigging structure. To ensure that the retargeted muscle is tightly packed inside a new character, we define a novel spatial optimization based on spherical parameterization. Our method requires no manual input, meaning that an animator does not require anatomical knowledge to create realistic accurate musculature models
A Revisit of Shape Editing Techniques: from the Geometric to the Neural Viewpoint
3D shape editing is widely used in a range of applications such as movie
production, computer games and computer aided design. It is also a popular
research topic in computer graphics and computer vision. In past decades,
researchers have developed a series of editing methods to make the editing
process faster, more robust, and more reliable. Traditionally, the deformed
shape is determined by the optimal transformation and weights for an energy
term. With increasing availability of 3D shapes on the Internet, data-driven
methods were proposed to improve the editing results. More recently as the deep
neural networks became popular, many deep learning based editing methods have
been developed in this field, which is naturally data-driven. We mainly survey
recent research works from the geometric viewpoint to those emerging neural
deformation techniques and categorize them into organic shape editing methods
and man-made model editing methods. Both traditional methods and recent neural
network based methods are reviewed
THREE DIMENSIONAL MODELING AND ANIMATION OF FACIAL EXPRESSIONS
Facial expression and animation are important aspects of the 3D environment featuring human characters. These animations are frequently used in many kinds of applications and there have been many efforts to increase the realism. Three aspects are still stimulating active research: the detailed subtle facial expressions, the process of rigging a face, and the transfer of an expression from one person to another. This dissertation focuses on the above three aspects.
A system for freely designing and creating detailed, dynamic, and animated facial expressions is developed. The presented pattern functions produce detailed and animated facial expressions. The system produces realistic results with fast performance, and allows users to directly manipulate it and see immediate results.
Two unique methods for generating real-time, vivid, and animated tears have been developed and implemented. One method is for generating a teardrop that continually changes its shape as the tear drips down the face. The other is for generating a shedding tear, which is a kind of tear that seamlessly connects with the skin as it flows along the surface of the face, but remains an individual object. The methods both broaden CG and increase the realism of facial expressions.
A new method to automatically set the bones on facial/head models to speed up the rigging process of a human face is also developed. To accomplish this, vertices that describe the face/head as well as relationships between each part of the face/head are grouped. The average distance between pairs of vertices is used to place the head bones. To set the bones in the face with multi-density, the mean value of the vertices in a group is measured. The time saved with this method is significant.
A novel method to produce realistic expressions and animations by transferring an existing expression to a new facial model is developed. The approach is to transform the source model into the target model, which then has the same topology as the source model. The displacement vectors are calculated. Each vertex in the source model is mapped to the target model. The spatial relationships of each mapped vertex are constrained
3D mesh metamorphosis from spherical parameterization for conceptual design
Engineering product design is an information intensive decision-making
process that consists of several phases including design specification
definition, design concepts generation, detailed design and analysis,
and manufacturing. Usually, generating geometry models for
visualization is a big challenge for early stage conceptual design.
Complexity of existing computer aided design packages constrains
participation of people with various backgrounds in the design
process. In addition, many design processes do not take advantage of
the rich amount of legacy information available for new concepts
creation.
The research presented here explores the use of advanced graphical
techniques to quickly and efficiently merge legacy information with
new design concepts to rapidly create new conceptual product designs.
3D mesh metamorphosis framework 3DMeshMorpher was created to
construct new models by navigating in a shape-space of registered
design models. The framework is composed of: i) a fast spherical
parameterization method to map a geometric model (genus-0) onto a unit
sphere; ii) a geometric feature identification and picking technique
based on 3D skeleton extraction; and iii) a LOD controllable 3D
remeshing scheme with spherical mesh subdivision based on the
developedspherical parameterization. This efficient software framework
enables designers to create numerous geometric concepts in real time
with a simple graphical user interface.
The spherical parameterization method is focused on closed genus-zero
meshes. It is based upon barycentric coordinates with convex boundary.
Unlike most existing similar approaches which deal with each vertex in
the mesh equally, the method developed in this research focuses
primarily on resolving overlapping areas, which helps speed the
parameterization process. The algorithm starts by normalizing the
source mesh onto a unit sphere and followed by some initial relaxation
via Gauss-Seidel iterations. Due to its emphasis on solving only
challenging overlapping regions, this parameterization process is much
faster than existing spherical mapping methods.
To ensure the correspondence of features from different models, we
introduce a skeleton based feature identification and picking method
for features alignment. Unlike traditional methods that align single
point for each feature, this method can provide alignments for
complete feature areas. This could help users to create more
reasonable intermediate morphing results with preserved topological
features. This skeleton featuring framework could potentially be
extended to automatic features alignment for geometries with similar
topologies. The skeleton extracted could also be applied for other
applications such as skeleton-based animations.
The 3D remeshing algorithm with spherical mesh subdivision is
developed to generate a common connectivity for different mesh models.
This method is derived from the concept of spherical mesh subdivision.
The local recursive subdivision can be set to match the desired LOD
(level of details) for source spherical mesh. Such LOD is controllable
and this allows various outputs with different resolutions. Such
recursive subdivision then follows by a triangular correction process
which ensures valid triangulations for the remeshing. And the final
mesh merging and reconstruction process produces the remeshing model
with desired LOD specified from user. Usually the final merged model
contains all the geometric details from each model with reasonable
amount of vertices, unlike other existing methods that result in big
amount of vertices in the merged model. Such multi-resolution outputs
with controllable LOD could also be applied in various other computer
graphics applications such as computer games
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