3D Character Animation Research Articles

3D Character Animation and Efficiency

ntroduce the technologies of 3D character animation in 3dsMax and Maya. These technologies include making skeletons, producing muscles, skinning, and creating animation etc. Compare these technologies in 3dsMax and Maya. Discuss the efficiency of 3D character animation and suggests methods to enhance the efficiency of 3D animation.

Authoring and animating painterly characters

Artists explore the visual style of animated characters through 2D concept art, since it affords them a nearly unlimited degree of creative freedom. Realizing the desired visual style, however, within the 3D character animation pipeline is often impossible, since artists must work within the technical limitations of the pipeline toolset. In order to expand the range of possible visual styles for digital characters, our research aims to incorporate the expressiveness afforded by 2D concept painting into the computer animation pipeline as a core component of character authoring and animation. While prior 3D painting methods focus on static geometry or simple animations, we develop tools for the more difficult task of character animation. Our system shows how 3D stroke-based paintings can be deformed using standard rigging tools. We also propose a configuration-space keyframing algorithm for authoring stroke effects that depend on scene variables such as character pose or light position. During animation, our system supports stroke-based temporal keyframing for one-off effects. Our primary technical contribution is a novel interpolation scheme for configuration-space keyframing that ensures smooth, controllable results. We demonstrate several characters authored with our system that exhibit painted effects difficult to achieve with traditional animation tools.

Sketching human character animations by composing sequences from large motion database

Quick creation of 3D character animations is an important task in game design, simulations, forensic animation, education, training, and more. We present a framework for creating 3D animated charac...

A sketch-based interface to modify and reproduce motion sequences

We present a sketch-based user interface, which was designed to help novices to create 3D character animations by multi-pass sketching, avoiding the ambiguities usually present in sketch input. Our system also contains sketch-based editing and reproducing tools, which allow paths and motions to be partially updated rather than wholly redrawn; and graphical block interface permits motion sequences to be organized and reconfigured easily. A user evaluation with participants of different skill levels suggest that novices using this sketch interface can produce animations almost as quickly as users who are experienced in 3D animation.

RigMesh

The creation of a 3D model is only the first stage of the 3D character animation pipeline. Once a model has been created, and before it can be animated, it must be rigged . Manual rigging is laborious, and automatic rigging approaches are far from real-time and do not allow for incremental updates. This is a hindrance in the real world, where the shape of a model is often revised after rigging has been performed. In this paper, we introduce algorithms and a user-interface for sketch-based 3D modeling that unify the modeling and rigging stages of the 3D character animation pipeline. Our algorithms create a rig for each sketched part in real-time, and update the rig as parts are merged or cut. As a result, users can freely pose and animate their shapes and characters while rapidly iterating on the base shape. The rigs are compatible with the state-of-the-art character animation pipeline; they consist of a low-dimensional skeleton along with skin weights identifying the surface with bones of the skeleton.

A non-expert-user interface for posing signing avatars

We describe a graphical user interface designed to allow non-expert users to pose 3D characters to create American Sign Language (ASL) computer animation. The interface is an important component of a software system that allows educators of the Deaf to add sign language translation, in the form of 3D character animations, to digital learning materials, thus making them accessible to deaf learners. A study indicates that users with no computer animation expertize can create animated ASL signs quickly and accurately.Implications for RehabilitationDeaf education, especially in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), is a pressing national problem in the U.S. Deaf individuals are significantly underrepresented in STEM fields.An important underlying cause of the educational lag is that young deaf students have limited access to grade-level curriculum materials (because of their low English literacy level).Computer animation of American Sign Language (ASL) has the potential to improve learning outcomes by making educational content deaf accessible, thus providing deaf children with the same learning opportunities as hearing students.The work reported in the paper shows that it is possible for deaf educators, who are not animators, to annotate digital lessons with ASL translation in the form of animated avatars, thus making them accessible to deaf children.

Optimized keyframe extraction for 3D character animations

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we propose a new method to automatically extract keyframes from animation sequences. Our method can be applied equally to both skeletal and mesh animations. It uses animation saliency computed on the original data to help select the group of keyframes that can reconstruct the input animation with less perception error. For computational efficiency, we perform nonlinear dimension reduction using locally linear embedding and then carry out the optimal search in much lower‐dimensional space. With this approach, reconstruction of the animation from the extracted keyframes shows much better results as compared with earlier approaches. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ADL 3D Character Animation Design Table Research and Application

3D character animation has into every aspect of our lives, How to raise the efficiency of development is still current domestic and international research one of the hot issues. This paper, based on the rehabilitation medicine ADL standard, Puts forward 3d characters ADL action based action split standards,According to the software engineering layered development and atom model thought, Design realize the ADL 3d character animation design table, Applied to the simulation training construction of action of oil field development, Effectively improve the oil workers 3d action role construction the efficiency of the development.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Special Section on the Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D)

THIS IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) special section brings to you extended versions of four excellent articles originally presented at the Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) in 2010. Since 1986, I3D has been a venue for cutting-edge computer science research in interactive graphics and human interaction. The field has grown significantly since the founding of I3D, but the symposium has maintained its premier status. Today, I3D is known for the close integration of academia and industry, and such is clear from the mixture of attendees and from the mixture of authors of the articles in this section. The symposium itself is also very popular, for it provides a great venue for meeting fellow researchers, forming new collaborations, and brainstorming new solutions. I3D 2010 received 71 submissions from 19 countries in four continents. Each paper received at least three independent reviews by a group of 86 experts in the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques. After a discussion phase, 23 papers were selected for publication and presentation at the symposium (an acceptance rate of 32 percent). There have been no limits imposed on the number of accepted papers, and the decisions were based purely on the submissions’ merits. Following a tradition started with I3D 2009, we invited the authors of four of the accepted papers to expand their work with new insights and results for publication in this special section of TVCG on I3D. The choice of the invited papers was based on the evaluation and comments of our expert reviewers. These papers went through a complete journal review process, which included multiple iterations of editing and review. “Stochastic Transparency” by Eric Enderton, Erik Sintorn, Peter Shirley, and David Luebke addresses the problem of achieving order-independent transparency for interactive rendering. The solution provided by the authors presents several desirable features: the required memory does not depend on the scene’s depth complexity; it renders a fixed number of passes, with its running time growing linearly with the number of fragments; it is general in the sense that it can replace multiple transparency algorithms for different scenarios; it is also easy to implement, and is a good fit to modern, massively parallel GPUs. The technique provides a practical solution for interactive applications, being capable of rendering all kinds of transparent geometry, and providing a unifying approach for orderindependent transparency, anti-aliasing, and shadowing. “Efficient Sparse Voxel Octrees” by Samuli Laine and Tero Karras explores the use of voxel representations for rendering complex detailed geometry on current and future GPUs. In order to efficiently ray cast the resulting models, the authors propose a compact data structure for storing voxels. In this representation, voxels are augmented with contour information to increase geometry resolution. The paper also describes a new normal compression format for storing high-precision object-space normals. Using the proposed infrastructure, the authors challenge the current graphics trend of using a base mesh augmented with fine details represented by textures and displacement maps: as the amount of color and geometric detail information grows beyond a certain limit, wouldn’t it make more sense to use a voxel representation to store both geometry and its associated attributes? “Frankenrigs: Building Character Rigs from Multiple Sources” by Christian Miller, Okan Arikan, and Don Fussel addresses an important practical problem in 3D character animation. Rigging and skinning a character is a fundamental animation task, but a time-consuming and tedious one even for experts. The authors present an automatic solution for generating good quality rigging and skinning that can greatly simplify the work of animators. Given a character’s 3D mesh with annotated joints, the technique finds good matches for individual parts of the model by scanning a database of partial rigs. By transferring information from the partial rigs to the target mesh, the approach produces a skeleton and skinning weights whose quality are similar to the ones produced by expert animators. “Improving Shape Depiction under Arbitrary Rendering” by Romain Vergne, Romain Pacanowski, Pascal Barla, Xavier Granier, and Christophe Schlick introduces a technique for enhancing shape depiction by scaling the reflected light as a function of curvature and material properties. Their solution can be used with any kind of material and works with both direct and global illumination. It can also be used with different lighting environments, supports inter-reflections, and works in real time. By providing intuitive control over the resulting shading, this 1034 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VOL. 17, NO. 8, AUGUST 2011

IPTV를 위한 감성 메신저의 개발

In the environment of instant messengers, the recognition of human emotions and its automated representation with personalized 3D character animations facilitate the use of affectivity in the machine-based communication, which will contribute to enhanced communication. This paper describes an emotional messenger system developed for the automated recognition and expression of emotions for IPTVs (Internet Protocol televisions). Aiming for efficient delivery of users` emotions, we propose emotion estimation that assesses the affective contents of given textual messages, character animation that supports both 3D rendering and video playback, and smart phone-based input method. Demonstration and experiments validate the usefulness and performance of the proposed system.

Real-Time Physics-Based 3D Biped Character Animation Using an Inverted Pendulum Model

We present a physics-based approach to generate 3D biped character animation that can react to dynamical environments in real time. Our approach utilizes an inverted pendulum model to online adjust the desired motion trajectory from the input motion capture data. This online adjustment produces a physically plausible motion trajectory adapted to dynamic environments, which is then used as the desired motion for the motion controllers to track in dynamics simulation. Rather than using Proportional-Derivative controllers whose parameters usually cannot be easily set, our motion tracking adopts a velocity-driven method which computes joint torques based on the desired joint angular velocities. Physically correct full-body motion of the 3D character is computed in dynamics simulation using the computed torques and dynamical model of the character. Our experiments demonstrate that tracking motion capture data with real-time response animation can be achieved easily. In addition, physically plausible motion style editing, automatic motion transition, and motion adaptation to different limb sizes can also be generated without difficulty.

Modeling and animation of 3D characters with ball B-splines

This paper proposed a new approach for modeling and animation of characters. Through using ball B-splines,an automatic character building model based on skeleton was realized and a character animation generation method driven by data was obtained. When the skeleton of a character was given,these radii on joints were obtained according to the length of bones in anthropometry. Then ball B-spline curves and surfaces were generated to represent characters through interpolating joint points and radii on them. The modeling method is rapid. Furthermore,by using motion data to update control points,real-time animation is achieved.

HandPuppet3D: Motion capture and analysis for character animation

Motion capture is a technique of digitally recording the movements of real entities, usually humans. It was originally developed as an analysis tool in biomechanics research, but has grown increasingly important as a source of motion data for computer animation. In this context it has been widely used for both cinema and video games. Hand motion capture and tracking in particular has received a lot of attention because of its critical role in the design of new Human Computer Interaction methods and gesture analysis. One of the main difficulties is the capture of human hand motion. This paper gives an overview of ongoing research "HandPuppet3D" being carried out in collaboration with an animation studio to employ computer vision techniques to develop a prototype desktop system and associated animation process that will allow an animator to control 3D character animation through the use of hand gestures. The eventual goal of the project is to support existing practice by providing a softer, more intuitive, user interface for the animator that improves the productivity of the animation workflow and the quality of the resulting animations. To help achieve this goal the focus has been placed on developing a prototype camera based desktop gesture capture system to capture hand gestures and interpret them in order to generate and control the animation of 3D character models. This will allow an animator to control 3D character animation through the capture and interpretation of hand gestures. Methods will be discussed for motion tracking and capture in 3D animation and in particular that of hand motion tracking and capture. HandPuppet3D aims to enable gesture capture with interpretation of the captured gestures and control of the target 3D animation software. This involves development and testing of a motion analysis system built from algorithms recently developed. We review current software and research methods available in this area and describe our current work.

A sketch-based approach to human body modelling

In this paper, we present a new approach and a novel interface, Virtual Human Sketcher (VHS), which enables those who can draw, to sketch-out various human body models. Our approach supports freehand drawing input and a ''Stick Figure->Fleshing-out->Skin Mapping'' modelling pipeline. Following this pipeline, a stick figure is drawn first to illustrate a figure pose, which is automatically reconstructed into 3D through a ''Multi-layered Back-Front Ambiguity Clarifier''. It is then fleshed-out with freehand body contours. A ''Creative Model-based Method'' is developed for interpreting the body size, shape, and fat distribution of the sketched figure and transferring it into a 3D human body through graphical comparisons and generic model morphing. The generic model is encapsulated with three distinct layers: skeleton, fat tissue, and skin. It can be transformed sequentially through rigid morphing, fatness morphing, and surface matching to match the 2D figure sketch. The initial resulting 3D body model can be incrementally modified through sketching directly on the 3D model. In addition, this body surface can be mapped onto a series of posed stick figures to be interpolated as a 3D character animation. VHS has been tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create plausible human bodies and animate them within minutes.

Latest Technologies and Trends of 3D Character Animation in Computer Games

Latest Technologies and Trends of 3D Character Animation in Computer Games

Character Animation and the Embodied Mind—Brain

This interdisciplinary investigation of aspects of 3D character animation synthesizes relevant research findings from diverse perspectives, including neuroscience, narratology, robotics, anthropology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind, and considers how they might be integrated as theory for animators and animation studies. The article focuses on the creative nature of character conception and creation in a 3D animated environment and on aspects of character — narrative and style, in particular. It examines how findings from interdisciplinary research on the embodied mind—brain, including neuroscientific research with regard to mentalizing and simulation theory, can inform the creative animation process and might be gainfully synthesized in an animation studies context to inform both pedagogy and creative practice.

디지털 모션 캡쳐(Motion Capture)를 위한 3D캐릭터 애니메이션의 종류별, 형태별 모델 분류

Among culture industry that greet digital generation and is observed 21th century the most representative game industry latest is caught what and more interest degree is rising. 2D and 3D animation accomplish continuous growth and development depending action expression along with development of computer technology, and 2D and 3D animation practical use extent are trend that is widening the area in TV, movie, GAME industry etc. through computer hardware and fast change of software technology. The trend of latest game graphic is trend that the weight is changing from 2D to 3D by 3D game and activation of 3D game character that raise player`s immersion stuff and Control in 2D`s simplicity manufacturing game balance for one side. This treatise that is reality of 3D game character to classify kind of (Motion Capture) and 3D character animation, form model the sense put. Recognize that is overview and reality of 3D game character first for this about example, and is considered to efficiency is high game industry and digital contents industry hereafter by proposing kind model classification of 3D game character animation, form model classification data and character animation manufacture process that application is possible at fast time and effect in 3D character animation application are big.

Automatic rigging and animation of 3D characters

Animating an articulated 3D character currently requires manual rigging to specify its internal skeletal structure and to define how the input motion deforms its surface. We present a method for animating characters automatically. Given a static character mesh and a generic skeleton, our method adapts the skeleton to the character and attaches it to the surface, allowing skeletal motion data to animate the character. Because a single skeleton can be used with a wide range of characters, our method, in conjunction with a library of motions for a few skeletons, enables a user-friendly animation system for novices and children. Our prototype implementation, called Pinocchio, typically takes under a minute to rig a character on a modern midrange PC.

Automatic rigging and animation of 3D characters

Automatic rigging and animation of 3D characters

Quantification of dance movement by simultaneous measurement of body motion and biophysical information

The purpose of this research is a quantitative analysis of movement patterns of dance, which cannot be analyzed with a motion capture system alone, using simultaneous measurement of body motion and biophysical information. In this research, two kinds of same leg movement are captured by simultaneous measurement; one is a leg movement with given strength, the other is a leg movement without strength on condition of basic experiment using optical motion capture and electromyography (EMG) equipment in order to quantitatively analyze characteristics of leg movement. Also, we measured the motion of the traditional Japanese dance using the constructed system. We can visualize leg movement of Japanese dance by displaying a 3D CG character animation with motion data and EMG data. In addition, we expect that our research will help dancers and researchers on dance through giving new information on dance movement which cannot be analyzed with only motion capture.