Volume 37 (2018)

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Aura Mesh: Motion Retargeting to Preserve the Spatial Relationships between Skinned Characters
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Jin, Taeil; Kim, Meekyoung; Lee, Sung-Hee; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Applying motion-capture data to multi-person interaction between virtual characters is challenging because one needs to preserve the interaction semantics while also satisfying the general requirements of motion retargeting, such as preventing penetration and preserving naturalness. An efficient means of representing interaction semantics is by defining the spatial relationships between the body parts of characters. However, existing methods consider only the character skeleton and thus are not suitable for capturing skin-level spatial relationships. This paper proposes a novel method for retargeting interaction motions with respect to character skins. Specifically, we introduce the aura mesh, which is a volumetric mesh that surrounds a character's skin. The spatial relationships between two characters are computed from the overlap of the skin mesh of one character and the aura mesh of the other, and then the interaction motion retargeting is achieved by preserving the spatial relationships as much as possible while satisfying other constraints. We show the effectiveness of our method through a number of experiments.
Collision-Aware and Online Compression of Rigid Body Simulations via Integrated Error Minimization
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Jeruzalski, Timothy; Kanji, John; Jacobson, Alec; Levin, David I. W.; Thuerey, Nils and Beeler, Thabo
Methods to compress simulation data are invaluable as they facilitate efficient transmission along the visual effects pipeline, fast and efficient replay of simulations for visualization and enable storage of scientific data. However, all current approaches to compressing simulation data require access to the entire dynamic simulation, leading to large memory requirements and additional computational burden. In this paper we perform compression of contact-dominated, rigid body simulations in an online, error-bounded fashion. This has the advantage of requiring access to only a narrow window of simulation data at a time while still achieving good agreement with the original simulation. Our approach is simulator agnostic allowing us to compress data from a variety of sources. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm by compressing contact-dominated rigid body simulations from a number of sources, achieving compression rates of up to 360 times over raw data size.
Computational Design of Transformables
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Yuan, Ye; Zheng, Changxi; Coros, Stelian; Thuerey, Nils and Beeler, Thabo
We present a computational approach to designing transformables, physical characters that can shape-shift to take on vastly different forms. The design process begins with a morphological description of an input character and a target object that it should transform into. Guided by a set of objectives that model the core attributes of desirable transformable designs, optimized embeddings are interactively generated. Intuitively, embeddings represent tightly folded character configurations that fit within the target object. From any feasible embedding, skin meshes are then generated for each body part of the character. The process for generating these 3D models is based on a segmentation of the target object, which is achieved through a growth-based model applied to a multiple level set representation of the transformable. A set of transformation-aware post-processing algorithms ensure the feasibility of the final designs. Building on this technical core, our computational design system provides many opportunities for users to inject their intuition and personal preferences into the process of creating transformables, while shielding them from tasks that are challenging and tedious. As a result, they can intuitively explore the vast space of design possibilities. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our computational approach by creating a variety of transformable designs, three of which we fabricate.
Data‐Driven Crowd Motion Control With Multi‐Touch Gestures
(© 2018 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Shen, Yijun; Henry, Joseph; Wang, He; Ho, Edmond S. L.; Komura, Taku; Shum, Hubert P. H.; Chen, Min and Benes, Bedrich
Controlling a crowd using multi‐touch devices appeals to the computer games and animation industries, as such devices provide a high‐dimensional control signal that can effectively define the crowd formation and movement. However, existing works relying on pre‐defined control schemes require the users to learn a scheme that may not be intuitive. We propose a data‐driven gesture‐based crowd control system, in which the control scheme is learned from example gestures provided by different users. In particular, we build a database with pairwise samples of gestures and crowd motions. To effectively generalize the gesture style of different users, such as the use of different numbers of fingers, we propose a set of gesture features for representing a set of hand gesture trajectories. Similarly, to represent crowd motion trajectories of different numbers of characters over time, we propose a set of crowd motion features that are extracted from a Gaussian mixture model. Given a run‐time gesture, our system extracts the nearest gestures from the database and interpolates the corresponding crowd motions in order to generate the run‐time control. Our system is accurate and efficient, making it suitable for real‐time applications such as real‐time strategy games and interactive animation controls.
Error Propagation Control in Laplacian Mesh Compression
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Vasa, Libor; Dvořák, Jan; Ju, Tao and Vaxman, Amir
Laplacian mesh compression, also known as high-pass mesh coding, is a popular technique for efficiently storing both static and dynamic triangle meshes that gained further recognition with the advent of perceptual mesh distortion evaluation metrics. Currently, the usual rule of thumb that drives the decision for a mesh compression algorithm is whether or not accuracy in absolute scale is required: Laplacian mesh encoding is chosen when perceptual quality is the main objective, while other techniques provide better results in terms of mechanistic error measures such as mean squared error. In this work, we present a modification of the Laplacian mesh encoding algorithm that preserves its benefits while it substantially reduces the resulting absolute error. Our approach is based on analyzing the reconstruction stage and modifying the quantization of differential coordinates, so that the decoded result stays close to the input even in areas that are distant from anchor points. In our approach, we avoid solving an overdetermined system of linear equations and thus reduce data redundancy, improve conditioning and achieve faster processing. Our approach can be directly applied to both static and dynamic mesh compression and we provide quantitative results comparing our approach with the state of the art methods.
An Explicit Structure-preserving Numerical Scheme for EPDiff
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Azencot, Omri; Vantzos, Orestis; Ben-Chen, Mirela; Ju, Tao and Vaxman, Amir
We present a new structure-preserving numerical scheme for solving the Euler-Poincaré Differential (EPDiff) equation on arbitrary triangle meshes. Unlike existing techniques, our method solves the difficult non-linear EPDiff equation by constructing energy preserving, yet fully explicit, update rules. Our approach uses standard differential operators on triangle meshes, allowing for a simple and efficient implementation. Key to the structure-preserving features that our method exhibits is a novel numerical splitting scheme. Namely, we break the integration into three steps which rely on linear solves with a fixed sparse matrix that is independent of the simulation and thus can be pre-factored. We test our method in the context of simulating concentrated reconnecting wavefronts on flat and curved domains. In particular, EPDiff is known to generate geometrical fronts which exhibit wave-like behavior when they interact with each other. In addition, we also show that at a small additional cost, we can produce globally-supported periodic waves by using our simulated fronts with wavefronts tracking techniques. We provide quantitative graphs showing that our method exactly preserves the energy in practice. In addition, we demonstrate various interesting results including annihilation and recreation of a circular front, a wave splitting and merging when hitting an obstacle and two separate fronts propagating and bending due to the curvature of the domain.
Few-shot Learning of Homogeneous Human Locomotion Styles
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Mason, Ian; Starke, Sebastian; Zhang, He; Bilen, Hakan; Komura, Taku; Fu, Hongbo and Ghosh, Abhijeet and Kopf, Johannes
Using neural networks for learning motion controllers from motion capture data is becoming popular due to the natural and smooth motions they can produce, the wide range of movements they can learn and their compactness once they are trained. Despite these advantages, these systems require large amounts of motion capture data for each new character or style of motion to be generated, and systems have to undergo lengthy retraining, and often reengineering, to get acceptable results. This can make the use of these systems impractical for animators and designers and solving this issue is an open and rather unexplored problem in computer graphics. In this paper we propose a transfer learning approach for adapting a learned neural network to characters that move in different styles from those on which the original neural network is trained. Given a pretrained character controller in the form of a Phase-Functioned Neural Network for locomotion, our system can quickly adapt the locomotion to novel styles using only a short motion clip as an example. We introduce a canonical polyadic tensor decomposition to reduce the amount of parameters required for learning from each new style, which both reduces the memory burden at runtime and facilitates learning from smaller quantities of data. We show that our system is suitable for learning stylized motions with few clips of motion data and synthesizing smooth motions in real-time.
FTP-SC: Fuzzy Topology Preserving Stroke Correspondence
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Yang, Wenwu; Seah, Hock-Soon; Chen, Quan; Liew, Hong-Ze; Sýkora, Daniel; Thuerey, Nils and Beeler, Thabo
Stroke correspondence construction is a precondition for vectorized 2D animation inbetweening and remains a challenging problem. This paper introduces the FTP-SC, a fuzzy topology preserving stroke correspondence technique, which is accurate and provides the user more effective control on the correspondence result than previous matching approaches. The method employs a two-stage scheme to progressively establish the stroke correspondence construction between the keyframes. In the first stage, the stroke correspondences with high confidence are constructed by enforcing the preservation of the so-called “fuzzy topology” which encodes intrinsic connectivity among the neighboring strokes. Starting with the high-confidence correspondences, the second stage performs a greedy matching algorithm to generate a full correspondence between the strokes. Experimental results show that the FTP-SC outperforms the existing approaches and can establish the stroke correspondence with a reasonable amount of user interaction even for keyframes with large geometric and spatial variations between strokes.
Motion Sickness Simulation Based on Sensorimotor Control
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Hu, Chen-Hui; Lin, Wen-Chieh; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Sensorimotor control is an essential mechanism for human motions, from involuntary reflex actions to intentional motor skill learning, such as walking, jumping, and swimming. Humans perform various motions according to different task goals and physiological sensory perception; however, most existing computational approaches for motion simulation and generation rarely consider the effects of human perception. The assumption of perfect perception (i.e., no sensory errors) of existing approaches restricts the generated motion types and makes dynamical reactions less realistic. We propose a general framework for sensorimotor control, integrating a balance controller and a vestibular model, to generate perception-aware motions. By exploiting simulated perception, more natural responses that are closer to human reactions can be generated. For example, motion sickness caused by the impairments in the function of the vestibular system induces postural instability and body sway. Our approach generates physically correct motions and reasonable reactions to external stimuli since the spatial orientation estimation by the vestibular system is essential to preserve balance. We evaluate our framework by demonstrating standing balance on a rotational platform with different angular speeds and duration. The generated motions show that either faster angular speeds or longer rotational duration cause more severe motion sickness. Our results demonstrate that sensorimotor control, integrating human perception and physically-based control, offers considerable potential for providing more human-like behaviors, especially for perceptual illusions of human beings, including visual, proprioceptive, and tactile sensations.
Real-time Locomotion Controller using an Inverted-Pendulum-based Abstract Model
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Hwang, Jaepyung; Kim, Jongmin; Suh, Il Hong; Kwon, Taesoo; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
In this paper, we propose a novel motion controller for the online generation of natural character locomotion that adapts to new situations such as changing user control or applying external forces. This controller continuously estimates the next footstep while walking and running, and automatically switches the stepping strategy based on situational changes. To develop the controller, we devise a new physical model called an inverted-pendulum-based abstract model (IPAM). The proposed abstract model represents high-dimensional character motions, inheriting the naturalness of captured motions by estimating the appropriate footstep location, speed and switching time at every frame. The estimation is achieved by a deep learning based regressor that extracts important features in captured motions. To validate the proposed controller, we train the model using captured motions of a human stopping, walking, and running in a limited space. Then, the motion controller generates humanlike locomotion with continuously varying speeds, transitions between walking and running, and collision response strategies in a cluttered space in real time.
Reformulating Hyperelastic Materials with Peridynamic Modeling
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Xu, Liyou; He, Xiaowei; Chen, Wei; Li, Sheng; Wang, Guoping; Fu, Hongbo and Ghosh, Abhijeet and Kopf, Johannes
Peridynamics is a formulation of the classical elastic theory that is targeted at simulating deformable objects with discontinuities, especially fractures. Till now, there are few studies that have been focused on how to model general hyperelastic materials with peridynamics. In this paper, we target at proposing a general strain energy function of hyperelastic materials for peridynamics. To get an intuitive model that can be easily controlled, we formulate the strain energy density function as a function parameterized by the dilatation and bond stretches, which can be decomposed into multiple one-dimensional functions independently. To account for nonlinear material behaviors, we also propose a set of nonlinear basis functions to help design a nonlinear strain energy function more easily. For an anisotropic material, we additionally introduce an anisotropic kernel to control the elastic behavior for each bond independently. Experiments show that our model is flexible enough to approximately regenerate various hyperelastic materials in classical elastic theory, including St.Venant-Kirchhoff and Neo-Hookean materials.
Robust Physics-based Motion Retargeting with Realistic Body Shapes
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Borno, Mazen Al; Righetti, Ludovic; Black, Michael J.; Delp, Scott L.; Fiume, Eugene; Romero, Javier; Thuerey, Nils and Beeler, Thabo
Motion capture is often retargeted to new, and sometimes drastically different, characters. When the characters take on realistic human shapes, however, we become more sensitive to the motion looking right. This means adapting it to be consistent with the physical constraints imposed by different body shapes. We show how to take realistic 3D human shapes, approximate them using a simplified representation, and animate them so that they move realistically using physically-based retargeting. We develop a novel spacetime optimization approach that learns and robustly adapts physical controllers to new bodies and constraints. The approach automatically adapts the motion of the mocap subject to the body shape of a target subject. This motion respects the physical properties of the new body and every body shape results in a different and appropriate movement. This makes it easy to create a varied set of motions from a single mocap sequence by simply varying the characters. In an interactive environment, successful retargeting requires adapting the motion to unexpected external forces. We achieve robustness to such forces using a novel LQR-tree formulation. We show that the simulated motions look appropriate to each character’'s anatomy and their actions are robust to perturbations.

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Browsing Volume 37 (2018) by Subject "Animation"

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