Example-based expressive animation of 2D rigid bodies

Abstract

We present a novel approach to facilitate the creation of stylized 2D rigid body animations. Our approach can handle multiple rigid objects following complex physically-simulated trajectories with collisions, while retaining a unique artistic style directly specified by the user. Starting with an existing target animation (e.g., produced by a physical simulation engine) an artist interactively draws over a sparse set of frames, and the desired appearance and motion stylization is automatically propagated to the rest of the sequence. The stylization process may also be performed in an off-line batch process from a small set of drawn sequences. To achieve these goals, we combine parametric deformation synthesis that generalizes and reuses hand-drawn exemplars, with non-parametric techniques that enhance the hand-drawn appearance of the synthesized sequence. We demonstrate the potential of our method on various complex rigid body animations which are created with an expressive hand-drawn look using notably less manual interventions as compared to traditional techniques.