SCA 08: Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/428

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Achieving Good Connectivity in Motion Graphs
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Zhao, Liming; Safonova, Alla; Markus Gross and Doug James
Motion graphs provide users with a simple yet powerful way to synthesize human motions. While motion graphbased synthesis has been widely successful, the quality of the generatedmotion depends largely on the connectivity of the graph and the quality of transitions in it. However, achieving both of these criteria simultaneously in motion graphs is difficult. Good connectivity requires transitions between less similar poses, while good motion quality results only when transitions happen between very similar poses. This paper introduces a new method for building motion graphs. The method first builds a set of interpolated motion clips, which contain many more similar poses than the original dataset. Using this set, the method then constructs a motion graph and reduces its size by minimizing the number of interpolated poses present in the graph. The outcome of the algorithm is a motion graph called a well-connected motion graph with very good connectivity and only smooth transitions. Our experimental results show that well-connected motion graphs outperform standardmotion graphs across a number of measures, result in very good motion quality, allow for high responsiveness when used for interactive control, and even do not require post-processing of the synthesizedmotions
Accurate Viscous Free Surfaces for Buckling, Coiling, and Rotating Liquids
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Batty, Christopher; Bridson, Robert; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present a fully implicit Eulerian technique for simulating free surface viscous liquids which eliminates artifacts in previous approaches, efficiently supports variable viscosity, and allows the simulation of more compelling viscous behaviour than previously achieved in graphics. Our method exploits a variational principle which automatically enforces the complex boundary condition on the shear stress at the free surface, while giving rise to a simple discretization with a symmetric positive definite linear system. We demonstrate examples of our technique capturing realistic buckling, folding and coiling behavior. In addition, we explain how to handle domains whose boundary comprises both ghost fluid Dirichlet and variational Neumann parts, allowing correct behaviour at free surfaces and solid walls for both our viscous solve and the variational pressure projection of Batty et al. [BBB07].
Motion-Motif Graphs
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Beaudoin, Philippe; Coros, Stelian; Panne, Michiel van de; Poulin, Pierre; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present a technique to automatically distill a motion-motif graph from an arbitrary collection of motion capture data. Motion motifs represent clusters of similar motions and together with their encompassing motion graph they lend understandable structure to the contents and connectivity of large motion datasets. They can be used in support of motion compression, the removal of redundant motions, and the creation of blend spaces. This paper develops a string-based motif-finding algorithm which allows for a user-controlled compromise between motif length and the number of motions in a motif. It allows for time warps within motifs and assigns the majority of the input data to relevant motifs. Results are demonstrated for large datasets (more than 100,000 frames) with computation times of tens of minutes.
Elevation Cable Modeling for Interactive Simulation of Cranes
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) García-Fernandez, Ignacio; Pla-Castells, Marta; Martinez-Dura, Rafael J.; Markus Gross and Doug James
In this paper, the way to simulate hoisting cables in real time is addressed. We overcome instability in such simulation by considering a two-layered model: a model for the dynamics of a cable passing through a set of pulleys and an oscillation model based on the classical one-dimensional wave equation. The first layer considers the interaction between the cable and pulleys with the elevation equipment, while the second layer simulates cable oscillation. Numerical instability is avoided by suspending the oscillation layer when required. Due to the system properties, this can be carried out in such a way that does not cause significant loss in the system quality. It considers the oscillation of the cable between every pair of pulleys, collision detection and the variation of the cable length very efficiently. Rendering issues are discussed, with remarks on how to prevent aliasing artifacts in the cable. Efficiency is analyzed, including performance tests which show that the model can be run very efficiently. The paper also covers how to integrate the model in a complex multibody simulation with a high degree of interactivity
Synthesis of Interactive Hand Manipulation
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Liu, C. Karen; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present an interactive physics-based motion synthesis technique for creating hand manipulation across a wide variety of tasks, objects, user interventions, and stylistic preferences. Given an object being manipulated, a single pose specifying the desired initial contact, and the kinematic goals of the manipulation, our algorithm automat- ically generates hand-object manipulation that is responsive to unscripted external disturbances. Our algorithm simulates the dynamic coupling between a passive dynamic system and an active dynamic system by formulating a sequence of constrained optimizations. This formulation allows the user to synthesize a manipulation task by describing simple, keyframe-like kinematic goals in the domain of object configuration. The algorithm will auto- matically produce the hand motion that achieves the kinematic goals via coupled dynamic equations of motion.
Meshless Modeling of Deformable Shapes and their Motion
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Adams, Bart; Ovsjanikov, Maks; Wand, Michael; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Guibas, Leonidas J.; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present a new framework for interactive shape deformation modeling and key frame interpolation based on a meshless finite element formulation. Starting from a coarse nodal sampling of an object's volume, we formulate rigidity and volume preservation constraints that are enforced to yield realistic shape deformations at interactive frame rates. Additionally, by specifying key frame poses of the deforming shape and optimizing the nodal displacements while targeting smooth interpolated motion, our algorithm extends to a motion planning framework for deformable objects. This allows reconstructing smooth and plausible deformable shape trajectories in the presence of possibly moving obstacles. The presented results illustrate that our framework can handle complex shapes at interactive rates and hence is a valuable tool for animators to realistically and efficiently model and interpolate deforming 3D shapes.
Perceptually Guided Expressive Facial Animation
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Deng, Zhigang; Ma, Xiaohan; Markus Gross and Doug James
Most of current facial animation approaches largely focus on the accuracy or efficiency of their algorithms, or how to optimally utilize pre-collected facial motion data. However, human perception, the ultimate measuring stick of the visual fidelity of synthetic facial animations, was not effectively exploited in these approaches. In this paper, we present a novel perceptually guided computational framework for expressive facial animation, by bridging objective facial motion patterns with subjective perceptual outcomes. First, we construct a facial perceptual metric (FacePEM) using a hybrid of region-based facial motion analysis and statistical learning techniques. The constructed FacePEM model can automatically measure the emotional expressiveness of a facial motion sequence. We showed how the constructed FacePEM model can be effectively incorporated into various facial animation algorithms. For the sake of clear demonstrations, we choose data-driven expressive speech animation generation and expressive facial motion editing as two concrete application examples. Through a comparative user study, we showed that comparing with the traditional facial animation algorithms, the introduced perceptually guided expressive facial animation algorithms can significantly increase the emotional expressiveness and perceptual believability of synthesized facial animations.
Interactive Terrain Modeling Using Hydraulic Erosion
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Stava, Ondrej; Benes, Bedrich; Brisbin, Matthew; Krivanek, Jaroslav; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present a step toward interactive physics-based modeling of terrains. A terrain, composed of layers of materials, is edited with interactive modeling tools built upon different physics-based erosion and deposition algorithms. First, two hydraulic erosion algorithms for running water are coupled. Areas where the motion is slow become more eroded by the dissolution erosion, whereas in the areas with faster motion, the force-based erosion prevails. Second, when the water under-erodes certain areas, slippage takes effect and the river banks fall into the water. A variety of local and global editing operation is provided. The user has a great level of control over the process and receives immediate feedback since the GPU-based erosion simulation runs at least at 20 fps on off-the-shelf computers for scenes with grid resolution of 2048×1024 and four layers of material. We also present a divide and conquer approach to handle large terrain erosion, where the terrain is tiled, and each tile calculated independently on the GPU. We show a wide variety of erosion-based modeling features such as forming rivers, drying flooded areas, rain, interactive manipulation with rivers, spring, adding obstacles into the water, etc.
Globally Coupled Collision Handling Using Volume Preserving Impulses
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Sifakis, Eftychios; Marino, Sebastian; Teran, Joseph; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present a novel algorithm for collision processing on triangulated meshes. Our method robustly maintains a collision free state on complex geometries while resorting to collision resolution at time intervals often comparable to the frame rate. Our approach is motivated by the behavior of a thin layer of fluid inserted in the empty space between nearly-colliding parts of the simulated surface, acting as a cushioning mechanism. Point-triangle or edge-edge pairs on a collision course are naturally resolved by the incompressible response of this fluid buffer. This response is formulated into a globally coupled nonlinear system which we solve using Newton iteration and symmetric, positive definite solvers. The globally coupled treatment of collisions allows us to resolve up to two orders of magnitude more collisions than traditional greedy algorithms (e.g. Gauss-Seidel collision response) and take substantially larger time steps without compromising the visual quality of the simulation.
Pose-Space Animation and Transfer of Facial Details
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Bickel, Bernd; Lang, Manuel; Botsch, Mario; Otaduy, Miguel A.; Gross, Markus; Markus Gross and Doug James
This paper presents a novel method for real-time animation of highly-detailed facial expressions based on a multi-scale decomposition of facial geometry into large-scale motion and fine-scale details, such as expression wrinkles. Our hybrid animation is tailored to the specific characteristics of large- and fine-scale facial deformations: Large-scale deformations are computed with a fast linear shell model, which is intuitively and accurately controlled through a sparse set of motion-capture markers or user-defined handle points. Fine-scale facial details are incorporated using a novel pose-space deformation technique, which learns the correspondence of sparse measurements of skin strain to wrinkle formation from a small set of example poses. Our hybrid method features real-time animation of highly-detailed faces with realistic wrinkle formation, and allows both large-scale deformations and fine-scale wrinkles to be edited intuitively. Furthermore, our pose-space representation enables the transfer of facial details to novel expressions or other facial models.
Staggered Poses: A Character Motion Representation for Detail-Preserving Editing of Pose and Coordinated Timing
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Coleman, Patrick; Bibliowicz, Jacobo; Singh, Karan; Gleicher, Michael; Markus Gross and Doug James
We introduce staggered poses - a representation of character motion that explicitly encodes coordinated timing among movement features in different parts of a character's body. This representation allows us to provide sparse, pose-based controls for editing motion that preserve existing movement detail, and we describe how to edit coordinated timing among extrema in these controls for stylistic editing. The staggered pose representation supports the editing of new motion by generalizing keyframe-based workflows to retain high-level control after local timing and transition splines have been created. For densely-sampled motion such as motion capture data, we present an algorithm that creates a staggered pose representation by locating coordinated movement features and modeling motion detail using splines and displacement maps. These techniques, taken together, enable feature-based keyframe editing of dense motion data.
Puppet Master: Designing Reactive Character Behavior by Demonstration
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Young, James E.; Igarashi, Takeo; Sharlin, Ehud; Markus Gross and Doug James
Puppet Master is a system that enables designers to rapidly create interactive and autonomous animated character behaviors that react to a main character controlled by an end-user. The behavior is designed by demonstration, allowing non-technical artists to intuitively design the style, personality, and emotion of the character, traits which are very difficult to design using conventional programming. During training, designers demonstrate paired behavior between the main and reacting characters. During run time, the end user controls the main character and the system synthesizes the motion of the reacting character using the given training data. The algorithm is an extension of Image Analogies, modified to synthesize dynamic character behavior instead of an image. We introduce non-trivial extensions to the algorithm such as our selection of features, dynamic balancing between similarity metrics, and separate treatment of path trajectory and high-frequency motion texture. We implemented a prototype system using physical pucks tracked by a motion-capture system and conducted a user study demonstrating that novice users can easily and successfully design character personality and emotion using our system and that the resulting behaviors are meaningful and engaging
Action Capture with Accelerometers
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Slyper, Ronit; Hodgins, Jessica; Markus Gross and Doug James
We create a performance animation system that leverages the power of low-cost accelerometers, readily available motion capture databases, and construction techniques from e-textiles. Our system, built with only off-theshelf parts, consists of five accelerometers sewn into a comfortable shirt that streams data to a computer. The accelerometer readings are continuously matched against accelerations computed from existing motion capture data, and an avatar is animated with the closest match. We evaluate our system visually and using simultaneous motion and accelerometer capture.
Density Contrast SPH Interfaces
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Solenthaler, Barbara; Pajarola, Renato; Markus Gross and Doug James
To simulate multiple fluids realistically many important interaction effects have to be captured accurately. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) has shown to be a simple, yet flexible method to cope with many fluid simulation problems in a robust way. Unfortunately, the results obtained when using SPH to simulate miscible fluids are severely affected, especially if density ratios become large. The undesirable effects reach from unphysical density and pressure variations to spurious and unnatural interface tensions, as well as severe numerical instabilities. In this work, we present a formulation based on SPH which can handle density discontinuities at interfaces between multiple fluids correctly without increasing the computational costs compared to standard SPH. The basic idea is to replace the density computation in SPH by a measure of particle densities and consequently derive new formulations for pressure and viscous forces. The new method enables the user to select the desired amount of interface tension according to the simulation problem at hand. We succeed to stably simulate multiple fluids with high density contrasts without the above described artifacts apparent in standard SPH simulations.
Visual Simulation of Shockwaves
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Sewall, Jason; Galoppo, Nico; Tsankov, Georgi; Lin, Ming; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present an efficient method for visual simulations of shock phenomena in compressible, inviscid fluids. Our algorithm is derived from one class of the finite volume method especially designed for capturing shock propagation, but offers improved efficiency through physically-based simplification and adaptation for graphical rendering. Our technique is well suited for parallel implementation on multicore architectures and is also capable of handling complex, bidirectional object-shock interactions stably and robustly. We describe its applications to various visual effects, including explosion, sonic booms and turbulent flows.
Composite Agents
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Yeh, Hengchin; Curtis, Sean; Patil, Sachin; Berg, Jur van den; Manocha, Dinesh; Lin, Ming; Markus Gross and Doug James
We introduce the concept of composite agents to effectively model complex agent interactions for agent-based crowd simulation. Each composite agent consists of a basic agent that is associated with one or more proxy agents. This formulation allows an agent to exercise influence over other agents greater than that implied by its physical properties. Composite agents can be added to most agent-based simulation systems and used to model emergent behaviors among individuals. In practice, there is negligible overhead of introducing composite agents in the simulation. We highlight their application to modeling aggression, social priority, authority, protection and guidance in complex scenes.
DrivenShape - a Data-driven Approach for Shape Deformation
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Kim, Tae-Yong; Vendrovsky, Eugene; Markus Gross and Doug James
DrivenShape is a data-driven technique that exploits known correspondence between two sets of shape deformations (e.g. a character's pose and her shirt). It allows users to drive deformation of secondary object simply by animating the pose shape. The tool is especially useful when the corresponding shapes are highly correlated and the space of all the possible shapes is limited. We have successfully used this technique in our recent productions, and it enabled artists to save on both computation time and man hours.
Image-based Collision Detection and Response between Arbitrary Volume Objects
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Faure, Francois; Barbier, Sebastien; Allard, Jeremie; Falipou, Florent; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present a new image-based method to process contacts between objects bounded by triangular surfaces. Unlike previous methods, it relies on image-based volume minimization, which eliminates complex geometrical computations and robustly handles deep intersections. The surfaces are rasterized in three orthogonal directions, and intersections are detected based on pixel depth and normal orientation. Per-pixel contact forces are computed and accumulated at the vertices. We show how to compute pressure forces which serve to minimize the intersection volume, as well as friction forces. No geometrical precomputation is required, which makes the method efficient for both deformable and rigid objects. We demonstrate it on rigid, skinned, and particle-based physical models with detailed surfaces in contacts at interactive frame rates.
Real-Time Planning for Parameterized Human Motion
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Lo, Wan-Yen; Zwicker, Matthias; Markus Gross and Doug James
We present a novel approach to learn motion controllers for real-time character animation based on motion capture data. We employ a tree-based regression algorithm for reinforcement learning, which enables us to generate motions that require planning. This approach is more flexible and more robust than previous strategies. We also extend the learning framework to include parameterized motions and interpolation. This enables us to control the character more precisely with a small amount of motion data. Finally, we present results of our algorithm for three different types of controllers.
Two-way Coupling of Rigid and Deformable Bodies
(The Eurographics Association, 2008) Shinar, Tamar; Schroeder, Craig; Fedkiw, Ronald; Markus Gross and Doug James
We propose a framework for the full two-way coupling of rigid and deformable bodies, which is achieved with both a unified time integration scheme as well as individual two-way coupled algorithms at each point of that scheme. As our algorithm is two-way coupled in every fashion, we do not require ad hoc methods for dealing with stability issues or interleaving parts of the simulation. We maintain the ability to treat the key desirable aspects of rigid bodies (e.g. contact, collision, stacking, and friction) and deformable bodies (e.g. arbitrary constitutive models, thin shells, and self-collisions). In addition, our simulation framework supports more advanced features such as proportional derivative controlled articulation between rigid bodies. This not only allows for the robust simulation of a number of new phenomena, but also directly lends itself to the design of deformable creatures with proportional derivative controlled articulated rigid skeletons that interact in a life-like way with their environment

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