Animated statues

Abstract

In this paper we present a layered framework for the animation of high-resolution human geometry captured using active 3D sensing technology. Commercial scanning systems can now acquire highly accurate surface data across the whole-body. However, the result is a dense, irregular, surface mesh without any structure for animation. We introduce a model-based approach to animating a scanned data-set by matching a generic humanoid control model to the surface data. A set of manually defined feature points are used to define body and facial pose, and a novel shape constrained matching algorithm is presented to deform the control model to match the scanned shape. This model-based approach allows the detailed specification of surface animation to be defined once for the generic model and re-applied to any captured scan. The detail of the high-resolution geometry is represented as a displacement map on the surface of the control model, providing smooth reconstruction of detailed shape on the animated control surface. The generic model provides animation control over the scan data-set, and the displacement map provides control of the high-resolution surface for editing of geometry, or level of detail in reconstruction or compression.

3-D studio production of animated actor models

“…Conversion of such models to a structured form suitable for animation require labour intensive manual remeshing. Structuring captured data in a form suitable for animation is a challenging problem which has received only limited attention for character models [14,15,27] and people [9,24]. Allen et al [1] have recently used captured models of naked people in multiple static poses to animate a persons skin deformation during movement.…”

“…The normal-volume for triangles on a polygonal mesh, M L , defines a continuous spatial mapping between the surface of the low-resolution model and the volume occupied by the high-resolution model, M H . Previous work [27,24] used this approach to efficiently represent high-resolution surface measurements captured using active 3D sensors such as laser scanners. It was also shown that this parameterisation could be used to seamlessly animate the high-resolution model based on deformation of the underlying control model.…”

“…Displacement mapping techniques have previously been used to represent fine surface detail for reconstruction of structured animated models from high-resolution range images of objects [14,1,22,24]. In this paper we introduce novel displacement mapping techniques for representation of surface detail reconstructed using passive stereo.…”

A functional-based segmentation of human body scans in arbitrary postures

“…This advance facilitates the exploitation of the HB form in various areas such as anthropometrical research [1]- [3], clothing design [4]- [6], and virtual human animation [7], [8]. Although the raw data generated by the HB scanner requires substantial main memory and storage resources, it contains little semantic information.…”

A topological approach for segmenting human body shape

“…This advance facilitates the exploitation of the HB form in various areas such as anthropometrical research [1,2], clothing design [3,4] and virtual human animation [5]. Although the raw data delivered by the HB scanner requires substantial main memory and backing store resources, this data contains little semantic information.…”