SCA 12: Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/424

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Multiphase Flow of Immiscible Fluids on Unstructured Moving Meshes
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Misztal, Marek Krzysztof; Erleben, Kenny; Bargteil, Adam; Fursund, Jens; Christensen, Brian Bunch; Bærentzen, J. Andreas; Bridson, Robert; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
In this paper, we present a method for animating multiphase flow of immiscible fluids using unstructured moving meshes. Our underlying discretization is an unstructured tetrahedral mesh, the deformable simplicial complex (DSC), that moves with the flow in a Lagrangian manner. Mesh optimization operations improve element quality and avoid element inversion. In the context of multiphase flow, we guarantee that every element is occupied by a single fluid and, consequently, the interface between fluids is represented by a set of faces in the simplicial complex. This approach ensures that the underlying discretization matches the physics and avoids the additional book-keeping required in grid-based methods where multiple fluids may occupy the same cell. Our Lagrangian approach naturally leads us to adopt a finite element approach to simulation, in contrast to the finite volume approaches adopted by a majority of fluid simulation techniques that use tetrahedral meshes. We characterize fluid simulation as an optimization problem allowing for full coupling of the pressure and velocity fields and the incorporation of a second-order surface energy. We introduce a preconditioner based on the diagonal Schur complement and solve our optimization on the GPU. We provide the results of parameter studies as well as a performance analysis of our method.
Precomputed Motion Maps for Unstructured Motion Capture
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Mahmudi, Mentar; Kallmann, Marcelo; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We present in this paper a solution for extracting high-quality motions from unstructured motion capture databases at interactive rates. The proposed solution is based on automatically-built motion graphs, and offers two key contributions. First, we show how precomputed expansion trees (or motion maps) coupled with new heuristics and backtracking techniques are able to significantly improve the time taken to search for motions satisfying user constraints. Second, we show that when feature-based transitions are employed for constructing the underlying motion graph, the connectivity of motion maps is greatly increased, allowing the overall method to perform search and synthesis at interactive frame rates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with the problem of extracting path-following motions around obstacles from a motion graph structure at interactive performances.
Learning Motion Controllers with Adaptive Depth Perception
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Lo, Wan-Yen; Knaus, Claude; Zwicker, Matthias; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We present a novel approach to real-time character animation that allows a character to move autonomously based on vision input. By allowing the character to ''see'' the environment directly using depth perception, we can skip the manual design phase of parameterizing the state space in a reinforcement learning framework. In previous work, this is done manually since finding a minimal set of parameters for describing a character's environment is crucial for efficient learning. Learning from raw vision input, however, suffers from the ''curse of dimensionality'', which we avoid by introducing a hierarchical state model and a novel regression algorithm. We demonstrate that our controllers allow a character to navigate and survive in environments containing arbitrarily shaped obstacles, which is hard to achieve with existing reinforcement learning frameworks.
Occlusion-free Camera Control for Multiple Targets
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Christie, Marc; Normand, Jean-Marie; Olivier, Patrick; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
Maintaining the visibility of target objects is a fundamental problem in automatic camera control for 3D graphics applications. Practical real-time camera control algorithms generally only incorporate mechanisms for the evaluation of the visibility of target objects from a single viewpoint, and idealize the geometric complexity of target objects. Drawing on work in soft shadow generation, we perform low resolution projections, from target objects to rapidly compute their visibility for a sample of locations around the current camera position. This computation is extended to aggregate visibility in a temporal window to improve camera stability in the face of partial and sudden onset occlusion. To capture the full spatial extent of target objects we use a stochastic approximation of their surface area. Our implementation is the first practical occlusion-free real-time camera control framework for multiple target objects. The result is a robust component that can be integrated to any virtual camera control system that requires the precise computation of visibility for multiple targets.
Component-based Locomotion Composition
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Kim, Yejin; Neff, Michael; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
When generating locomotion, it is particularly challenging to adjust the motion's style. This paper introduces a component-based system for human locomotion composition that drives off a set of example locomotion clips. The distinctive style of each example is analyzed in the form of sub-motion components decomposed from separate body parts via independent component analysis (ICA). During the synthesis process, we use these components as combinatorial ingredients to generate new locomotion sequences that are stylistically different from the example set. Our system is designed for novice users who do not have much knowledge of important locomotion properties, such as the correlations throughout the body. Thus, the proposed system analyzes the examples in a unsupervised manner and synthesizes an output locomotion from a small number of control parameters. Our experimental results show that the system can generate physically plausible locomotion in a desired style at interactive speed.
Dynamic Units of Visual Speech
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Taylor, Sarah L.; Mahler, Moshe; Theobald, Barry-John; Matthews, Iain; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We present a new method for generating a dynamic, concatenative, unit of visual speech that can generate realistic visual speech animation. We redefine visemes as temporal units that describe distinctive speech movements of the visual speech articulators. Traditionally visemes have been surmized as the set of static mouth shapes representing clusters of contrastive phonemes (e.g. /p, b, m/, and /f, v/). In this work, the motion of the visual speech articulators are used to generate discrete, dynamic visual speech gestures. These gestures are clustered, providing a finite set of movements that describe visual speech, the visemes. Dynamic visemes are applied to speech animation by simply concatenating viseme units. We compare to static visemes using subjective evaluation. We find that dynamic visemes are able to produce more accurate and visually pleasing speech animation given phonetically annotated audio, reducing the amount of time that an animator needs to spend manually refining the animation.
Cloning Crowd Motions
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Li, Yi; Christie, Marc; Siret, Orianne; Kulpa, Richard; Pettré, Julien; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
This paper introduces a method to clone crowd motion data. Our goal is to efficiently animate large crowds from existing examples of motions of groups of characters by applying an enhanced copy and paste technique on them. Specifically, we address spatial and temporal continuity problems to enable animation of significantly larger crowds than our initial data. We animate many characters from the few examples with no limitation on duration. Moreover, our animation technique answers the needs of real-time applications through a technique of linear complexity. Therefore, it is significantly more efficient than any existing crowd simulation-based technique, and in addition, we ensure a predictable level of realism for animations. We provide virtual population designers and animators with a powerful framework which (i) enables them to clone crowd motion examples while preserving the complexity and the aspect of group motion and (ii) is able to animate large-scale crowds in real-time. Our contribution is the formulation of the cloning problem as a double search problem. Firstly, we search for almost periodic portions of crowd motion data through the available examples. Secondly, we search for almost symmetries between the conditions at the limits of these portions in order to interconnect them. The result of our searches is a set of crowd patches that contain portions of example data that can be used to compose large and endless animations. Through several examples prepared from real crowd motion data, we demonstrate the advantageous properties of our approach as well as identify its potential for future developments.
Enriching Coarse Interactive Elastic Objects with High-Resolution Data-Driven Deformations
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Seiler, Martin; Spillmann, Jonas; Harders, Matthias; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
Efficient approximate deformation models allow to interactively simulate elastic objects. However, these approaches usually cannot reproduce the complex deformation behavior governed by geometric and material nonlinearities. In addition, objects having slender shapes require dense simulation meshes, which necessitates additional computational effort. We propose an approach where a dynamic interactive coarse simulation is enriched with details stemming from a more accurate quasi-static simulation in a data-driven way. While the coarse simulation is based on a low-resolution (low-res) mesh and a fast linear deformation model the accurate simulation employs a quasi-static non-linear deformation model at a higher mesh resolution (high-res). We pre-compute pairs of low-res mesh deformations and corresponding high-res details by applying a series of training interactions on both the coarse and the accurate model. At run-time, we only run the coarse simulation and correlate the current state to the training states. Subsequently, we blend detail data in order to obtain a spatio-temporally smooth displacement field that we super-impose on the surface skin, resulting in a plausible display of the non-linearly deformed object at real-time rates. We present examples from both computer animation and medical simulation.
Multi-linear Data-Driven Dynamic Hair Model with Efficient Hair-Body Collision Handling
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Guan, Peng; Sigal, Leonid; Reznitskaya, Valeria; Hodgins, Jessica K.; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We present a data-driven method for learning hair models that enables the creation and animation of many interactive virtual characters in real-time (for gaming, character pre-visualization and design). Our model has a number of properties that make it appealing for interactive applications: (i) it preserves the key dynamic properties of physical simulation at a fraction of the computational cost, (ii) it gives the user continuous interactive control over the hair styles (e.g., lengths) and dynamics (e.g., softness) without requiring re-styling or re-simulation, (iii) it deals with hair-body collisions explicitly using optimization in the low-dimensional reduced space, (iv) it allows modeling of external phenomena (e.g., wind). Our method builds on the recent success of reduced models for clothing and fluid simulation, but extends them in a number of significant ways. We model motion of hair in a conditional reduced sub-space, where the hair basis vectors, which encode dynamics, are linear functions of userspecified hair parameters. We formulate collision handling as an optimization in this reduced sub-space using fast iterative least squares. We demonstrate our method by building dynamic, user-controlled models of hair styles.
Simple Data-Driven Control for Simulated Bipeds
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Geijtenbeek, T.; Pronost, Nicolas; Stappen, A. F. van der; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We present a framework for controlling physics-based bipeds in a simulated environment, based on a variety of reference motions. Unlike existing methods for control based on reference motions, our framework does not require preprocessing of the reference motion, nor does it rely on inverse dynamics or on-line optimization methods for torque computation. It consists of three components: Proportional-Derivative Control to mimic motion characteristics, a specific form of Jacobian Transpose Control for balance control, and Covariance Matrix Adaption for off-line parameter optimization, based on a novel high-level reward function. The framework can easily be implemented using common off-the-shelf physics engines, and generates simulations at approximately 4x realtime on a single core of a modern PC. Our framework advances the state-of-the-art by demonstrating motions of a diversity and dynamic nature previously unseen in comparable methods, including squatting, bowing, kicking, and dancing motions. We also demonstrate its ability to withstand external perturbations and adapt to changes in character morphology.
Long Range Attachments - A Method to Simulate Inextensible Clothing in Computer Games
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Kim, Tae-Yong; Chentanez, Nuttapong; Müller-Fischer, Matthias; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
Inextensibility is one of the most fundamental properties of cloth. Existing approaches to handle inextensibility often require solving global non-linear systems and remain computationally expensive for computer game uses. Real time performance can be achieved by allowing damping or stretching at reduced solver costs, but these compromise visual realism - the cloth either looks stretchy or fine wrinkles get lost. Our long range attachment (LRA) method exploits that typical game character clothing tends to be attached to some kinematic parts of the character. LRA method applies unilateral distance constraint between free particles of the cloth to distant attachment point on the character, preventing them from stretching away from the kinematically driven attachments (e.g. shoulder for a cape). This simple step provides an efficient shortcut for enforcing global inextensibility that can be readily implemented into existing game physics methods such as PBD.
Physically Plausible Simulation for Character Animation
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Levine, Sergey; Popovic, Jovan; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
Artist-created animated characters can exhibit stylized, engaging behavior, but require considerable effort to construct, while interactive applications require numerous motions and variations to create a dynamic, believable character. This paper describes a method for generating some of these variations automatically: given a stream of poses, our method simulates plausible responses to physical disturbances and environmental variations. Our quasi-physical simulation accounts for the dynamics of the character and surrounding objects, but does not require the motion to be physically valid, making it suitable for both realistic and stylized, cartoony motions. It further does not require any preprocessing, allowing it to run as an online filter that transforms the output of any real-time animation system. Our prototype runs at 50 Hz, on bipeds and quadrupeds with over 50 degrees of freedom, and generates plausible variations for walking, running, hopping, crawling, rolling, cartwheeling, and other motions.
The Intersection Contour Minimization Method for Untangling Oriented Deformable Surfaces
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Ye, Juntao; Zhao, Jing; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
The Intersection Contour Minimization (ICM) method [VM06] has been proven to be an effective history-free algorithm for resolving collisions between non-oriented deformable surfaces. In many circumstances, however, surface orientation information are often implied in the context. Being completely blind to such information in the ICM method often leads to unexpected result: either failure or slow convergence in certain intersection config- urations. By introducing the concept of ''repulsive normal'' into ICM, many of those once-failure configurations can be resolved successfully. Even for those once-successful configurations, repulsive normals usually speed-up the convergence. Moreover, the ICM method that was originally designed for polygonal meshes can actually be adapted to resolve collisions between a polygon mesh and an analytical surface. This paper presents one such extension collisions between a polygon mesh and a capsule.
Controlling Liquids Using Meshes
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Raveendran, Karthik; Thuerey, Nils; Wojtan, Chris; Turk, Greg; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We present an approach for artist-directed animation of liquids using multiple levels of control over the simulation, ranging from the overall tracking of desired shapes to highly detailed secondary effects such as dripping streams, separating sheets of fluid, surface waves and ripples. The first portion of our technique is a volume preserving morph that allows the animator to produce a plausible fluid-like motion from a sparse set of control meshes. By rasterizing the resulting control meshes onto the simulation grid, the mesh velocities act as boundary conditions during the projection step of the fluid simulation. We can then blend this motion together with uncontrolled fluid velocities to achieve a more relaxed control over the fluid that captures natural inertial effects. Our method can produce highly detailed liquid surfaces with control over sub-grid details by using a mesh-based surface tracker on top of a coarse grid-based fluid simulation. We can create ripples and waves on the fluid surface attracting the surface mesh to the control mesh with spring-like forces and also by running a wave simulation over the surface mesh. Our video results demonstrate how our control scheme can be used to create animated characters and shapes that are made of water.
Efficient Collision Detection for Brittle Fracture
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Glondu, Loeiz; Schvartzman, Sara C.; Marchal, Maud; Dumont, Georges; Otaduy, Miguel A.; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
In complex scenes with many objects, collision detection plays a key role in the simulation performance. This is particularly true for fracture simulation, where multiple new objects are dynamically created. In this paper, we present novel algorithms and data structures for collision detection in real-time brittle fracture simulations. We build on a combination of well-known efficient data structures, namely distance fields and sphere trees, making our algorithm easy to integrate on existing simulation engines. We propose novel methods to construct these data structures, such that they can be efficiently updated upon fracture events and integrated in a simple yet effective self-adapting contact selection algorithm. Altogether, we drastically reduce the cost of both collision detection and collision response. We have evaluated our global solution for collision detection on challenging scenarios, achieving high frame rates suited for hard real-time applications such as video games or haptics. Our solution opens promising perspectives for complex brittle fracture simulations involving many dynamically created objects.
Efficient Simulation of Example-Based Materials
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Schumacher, Christian; Thomaszewski, Bernhard; Coros, Stelian; Martin, Sebastian; Sumner, Robert; Gross, Markus; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We present a new method for efficiently simulating art-directable deformable materials. We use example poses to define subspaces of desirable deformations via linear interpolation. As a central aspect of our approach, we use an incompatible representation for input and interpolated poses that allows us to interpolate between elements individually. This enables us to bypass costly reconstruction steps and we thus achieve significant performance improvements compared to previous work. As a natural continuation, we furthermore present a formulation of example-based plasticity. Finally, we extend the directability of example-based materials and explore a number of powerful control mechanisms. We demonstrate these novel concepts on a number of solid and shell animations including artistic deformation behaviors, cartoon physics, and example-based pose space dynamics.
Real-Time Example-Based Elastic Deformation
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Koyama, Yuki; Takayama, Kenshi; Umetani, Nobuyuki; Igarashi, Takeo; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We present an example-based elastic deformation method that runs in real time. Example-based elastic deformation was originally presented by Martin et al. [MTGG11], where an artist can intuitively control elastic material behaviors by simply giving example poses. Their FEM-based approach is, however, computationally expensive requiring nonlinear optimization, which hinders its use in real-time applications such as games. Our contribution is to formulate an analogous concept using the shape matching framework, which is fast, robust, and easy to implement. The key observation is that each overlapping local region's right stretch tensor obtained by polar decomposition is a natural choice for a deformation descriptor. This descriptor allows us to represent the pose space as a linear blending of examples. At each time step, the current deformation descriptor is linearly projected onto the example manifold, and then used to modify the rest shape of each local region when computing goal positions. Our approach is two orders of magnitude faster than Martin et al.'s approach while producing comparable example-based elastic deformations.
Efficient Composition for Virtual Camera Control
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Lino, Christophe; Christie, Marc; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
Automatically positioning a virtual camera in a 3D environment given the specification of visual properties to be satisfied (on-screen layout of subjects, vantage angles, visibility) is a complex and challenging problem. Most approaches tackle the problem by expressing visual properties as constraints or functions to optimize, and rely on computationally expensive search techniques to explore the solution space. We show here how to express and solve the exact on-screen positioning of two or three subjects using a simple and very efficient technique. We express the solution space for each couple of subjects as a 2D manifold surface. We demonstrate how to use this manifold surface to solve Blinn's spacecraft problem with a straightforward algebraic approach. We extend the solution to three subjects and we show how to cast the complex 6D optimization problem tackled by most contributions in the field in a simple 2D optimization on the manifold surface by pruning large portions of the search space. The result is a robust and very efficient technique which finds a wide range of applications in virtual camera control and more generally in computer graphics.
Tiling Motion Patches
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Kim, Manmyung; Hwang, Youngseok; Hyun, Kyunglyul; Lee, Jehee; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
Simulating multiple character interaction is challenging because character actions must be carefully coordinated to align their spatial locations and synchronized with each other. We present an algorithm to create a dense crowd of virtual characters interacting with each other. The interaction may involve physical contacts, such as hand shaking, hugging, and carrying a heavy object collaboratively. We address the problem by collecting deformable motion patches, each of which describes an episode of multiple interacting characters, and tiling them spatially and temporally. The tiling of motion patches generates a seamless simulation of virtual characters interacting with each other in a non-trivial manner. Our tiling algorithm uses a combination of stochastic sampling and deterministic search to address the discrete and continuous aspects of the tiling problem. Our tiling algorithm made it possible to automatically generate highly-complex animation of multiple interacting characters. We achieved the level of complexity far beyond the current state-of-the-art animation techniques could generate, in terms of the diversity of human behaviors and the spatial/temporal density of interpersonal interactions.
Faster Acceleration Noise for Multibody Animations using Precomputed Soundbanks
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Chadwick, Jeffrey N.; Zheng, Changxi; James, Doug L.; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
We introduce an efficient method for synthesizing rigid-body acceleration noise for complex multibody scenes. Existing acceleration noise synthesis methods for animation require object-specific precomputation, which is prohibitively expensive for scenes involving rigid-body fracture or other sources of small, procedurally generated debris. We avoid precomputation by introducing a proxy-based method for acceleration noise synthesis in which precomputed acceleration noise data is only generated for a small set of ellipsoidal proxies and stored in a proxy soundbank. Our proxy model is shown to be effective at approximating acceleration noise from scenes with lots of small debris (e.g., pieces produced by rigid-body fracture). This approach is not suitable for synthesizing acceleration noise from larger objects with complicated non-convex geometry; however, it has been shown in previous work that acceleration noise from objects such as these tends to be largely masked by modal vibration sound. We manage the cost of our proxy soundbank with a new wavelet-based compression scheme for acceleration noise and use our model to significantly improve sound synthesis results for several multibody animations.

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