SCA 2021: Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation

Permanent URI for this collection

https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2633152

Proceedings Information

papers

Coupling Friction with Visual Appearance

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Sheldon Andrews, Loic Nassif, Kenny Erleben, and Paul G. Kry

Volume Preserving Simulation of Soft Tissue with Skin

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Seung Heon Sheen, Egor Larionov, and Dinesh K. Pai

Fast Corotated Elastic SPH Solids with Implicit Zero-Energy Mode Control

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Tassilo Kugelstadt, Jan Bender, José Antonio Fernández-Fernández, Stefan Rhys Jeske, Fabian Löschner, and Andreas Longva

A functional skeleton transfer

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Pietro Musoni, Riccardo Marin, Simone Melzi, and Umberto Castellani

Flexible Motion Optimization with Modulated Assistive Forces

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Nam Hee Kim, Hung Yu Ling, Zhaoming Xie, and Michiel Van De Panne

Diverse Motion Stylization for Multiple Style Domains via Spatial-Temporal Graph-Based Generative Model

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Soomin Park, Deok-Kyeong Jang, and Sung-Hee Lee

Three Dimensional Reconstruction of Botanical Trees with Simulatable Geometry

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Ed Quigley, Winnie Lin, Yilin Zhu, and Ronald Fedkiw

Recovering Geometric Information with Learned Texture Perturbations

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Jane Wu, Yongxu Jin, Zhenglin Geng, Hui Zhou, and Ronald Fedkiw

Global Position Prediction for Interactive Motion Capture

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Paul Schreiner, Maksym Perepichka, Hayden Lewis, Sune Darkner, Paul G. Kry, Kenny Erleben, and Victor B. Zordan

Neural UpFlow: A Scene Flow Learning Approach to Increase the Apparent Resolution of Particle-Based Liquids

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Bruno Roy, Pierre Poulin, and Eric Paquette

Visual Simulation of Soil-Structure Destruction with Seepage Flows

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Xu Wang, Makoto Fujisawa, and Masahiko Mikawa

A Perceptually-Validated Metric for Crowd Trajectory Quality Evaluation

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Beatriz Cabrero Daniel, Ricardo Marques, Ludovic Hoyet, Julien Pettré, and Josep Blat

Efficient acoustic perception for virtual AI agents

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Mike Chemistruck, Andrew Allen, John Snyder, and Nikunj Raghuvanshi

A GAN-Like Approach for Physics-Based Imitation Learning and Interactive Control

[full paper

] [meta data

]

Pei Xu and Ioannis Karamouzas

BibTeX (SCA 2021: Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation)

@inproceedings{:10.1145/issue-information,
https::/diglib.eg.org:443/handle/10.1145/issue-information,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Issue Information}},

author = {Narain, Rahul and 
Neff, Michael and 
Zordan, Victor
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {/10.1145/issue-information}
https://diglib.eg.org:443/handle/10.1145/issue-information}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480138,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Coupling Friction with Visual Appearance}},

author = {Andrews, Sheldon and 
Nassif, Loic and 
Erleben, Kenny and 
Kry, Paul G.
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480138}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480143,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Volume Preserving Simulation of Soft Tissue with Skin}},

author = {Sheen, Seung Heon and 
Larionov, Egor and 
Pai, Dinesh K.
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480143}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480142,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Fast Corotated Elastic SPH Solids with Implicit Zero-Energy Mode Control}},

author = {Kugelstadt, Tassilo and 
Bender, Jan and 
Fernández-Fernández, José Antonio and 
Jeske, Stefan Rhys and 
Löschner, Fabian and 
Longva, Andreas
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480142}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480144,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Flexible Motion Optimization with Modulated Assistive Forces}},

author = {Kim, Nam Hee and 
Ling, Hung Yu and 
Xie, Zhaoming and 
Panne, Michiel Van De
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480144}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480140,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{A functional skeleton transfer}},

author = {Musoni, Pietro and 
Marin, Riccardo and 
Melzi, Simone and 
Castellani, Umberto
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480140}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480145,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Diverse Motion Stylization for Multiple Style Domains via Spatial-Temporal Graph-Based Generative Model}},

author = {Park, Soomin and 
Jang, Deok-Kyeong and 
Lee, Sung-Hee
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480145}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480137,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Recovering Geometric Information with Learned Texture Perturbations}},

author = {Wu, Jane and 
Jin, Yongxu and 
Geng, Zhenglin and 
Zhou, Hui and 
Fedkiw, Ronald
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480137}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480146,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Three Dimensional Reconstruction of Botanical Trees with Simulatable Geometry}},

author = {Quigley, Ed and 
Lin, Winnie and 
Zhu, Yilin and 
Fedkiw, Ronald
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480146}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3479985,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Global Position Prediction for Interactive Motion Capture}},

author = {Schreiner, Paul and 
Perepichka, Maksym and 
Lewis, Hayden and 
Darkner, Sune and 
Kry, Paul G. and 
Erleben, Kenny and 
Zordan, Victor B.
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3479985}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480141,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Visual Simulation of Soil-Structure Destruction with Seepage Flows}},

author = {Wang, Xu and 
Fujisawa, Makoto and 
Mikawa, Masahiko
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480141}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480136,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{A Perceptually-Validated Metric for Crowd Trajectory Quality Evaluation}},

author = {Daniel, Beatriz Cabrero and 
Marques, Ricardo and 
Hoyet, Ludovic and 
Pettré, Julien and 
Blat, Josep
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480136}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480147,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Neural UpFlow: A Scene Flow Learning Approach to Increase the Apparent Resolution of Particle-Based Liquids}},

author = {Roy, Bruno and 
Poulin, Pierre and 
Paquette, Eric
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480147}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480148,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{A GAN-Like Approach for Physics-Based Imitation Learning and Interactive Control}},

author = {Xu, Pei and 
Karamouzas, Ioannis
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480148}

}

@inproceedings{10.1145:3480139,

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},

editor = {Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
},
title = {{Efficient acoustic perception for virtual AI agents}},

author = {Chemistruck, Mike and 
Allen, Andrew and 
Snyder, John and 
Raghuvanshi, Nikunj
},
year = {2021},

publisher = {ACM},

ISSN = {2577-6193},

DOI = {10.1145/3480139}

}

Browse

Now showing 1 - 15 of 15

Issue Information
(ACM, 2021) Narain, Rahul; Neff, Michael; Zordan, Victor; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
Table of Contents, Editors' Preface, and Author Index
Coupling Friction with Visual Appearance
(ACM, 2021) Andrews, Sheldon; Nassif, Loic; Erleben, Kenny; Kry, Paul G.; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
We present a novel meso-scale model for computing anisotropic and asymmetric friction for contacts in rigid body simulations that is based on surface facet orientations. The main idea behind our approach is to compute a direction dependent friction coefficient that is determined by an object's roughness. Specifically, where the friction is dependent on asperity interlocking, but at a scale where surface roughness is also a visual characteristic of the surface. A GPU rendering pipeline is employed to rasterize surfaces using a shallow depth orthographic projection at each contact point in order to sample facet normal information from both surfaces, which we then combine to produce direction dependent friction coefficients that can be directly used in typical LCP contact solvers, such as the projected Gauss-Seidel method. We demonstrate our approach with a variety of rough textures, where the roughness is both visible in the rendering and in the motion produced by the physical simulation.
Volume Preserving Simulation of Soft Tissue with Skin
(ACM, 2021) Sheen, Seung Heon; Larionov, Egor; Pai, Dinesh K.; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
Simulation of human soft tissues in contact with their environment is essential in many fields, including visual effects and apparel design. Biological tissues are nearly incompressible. However, standard methods employ compressible elasticity models and achieve incompressibility indirectly by setting Poisson's ratio to be close to 0.5. This approach can produce results that are plausible qualitatively but inaccurate quantatively. This approach also causes numerical instabilities and locking in coarse discretizations or otherwise poses a prohibitive restriction on the size of the time step. We propose a novel approach to alleviate these issues by replacing indirect volume preservation using Poisson's ratios with direct enforcement of zonal volume constraints, while controlling fine-scale volumetric deformation through a cell-wise compression penalty. To increase realism, we propose an epidermis model to mimic the dramatically higher surface stiffness on real skinned bodies. We demonstrate that our method produces stable realistic deformations with precise volume preservation but without locking artifacts. Due to the volume preservation not being tied to mesh discretization, our method also allows a resolution consistent simulation of incompressible materials. Our method improves the stability of the standard neo-Hookean model and the general compression recovery in the Stable neo-Hookean model.
Fast Corotated Elastic SPH Solids with Implicit Zero-Energy Mode Control
(ACM, 2021) Kugelstadt, Tassilo; Bender, Jan; Fernández-Fernández, José Antonio; Jeske, Stefan Rhys; Löschner, Fabian; Longva, Andreas; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
We develop a new operator splitting formulation for the simulation of corotated linearly elastic solids with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). Based on the technique of Kugelstadt et al. [2018] originally developed for the Finite Element Method (FEM), we split the elastic energy into two separate terms corresponding to stretching and volume conservation, and based on this principle, we design a splitting scheme compatible with SPH. The operator splitting scheme enables us to treat the two terms separately, and because the stretching forces lead to a stiffness matrix that is constant in time, we are able to prefactor the system matrix for the implicit integration step. Solid-solid contact and fluid-solid interaction is achieved through a unified pressure solve. We demonstrate more than an order of magnitude improvement in computation time compared to a state-of-the-art SPH simulator for elastic solids. We further improve the stability and reliability of the simulation through several additional contributions. We introduce a new implicit penalty mechanism that suppresses zero-energy modes inherent in the SPH formulation for elastic solids, and present a new, physics-inspired sampling algorithm for generating highquality particle distributions for the rest shape of an elastic solid. We finally also devise an efficient method for interpolating vertex positions of a high-resolution surface mesh based on the SPH particle positions for use in high-fidelity visualization.
Flexible Motion Optimization with Modulated Assistive Forces
(ACM, 2021) Kim, Nam Hee; Ling, Hung Yu; Xie, Zhaoming; Panne, Michiel Van De; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
Animated motions should be simple to direct while also being plausible. We present a flexible keyframe-based character animation system that generates plausible simulated motions for both physically-feasible and physically-infeasible motion specifications. We introduce a novel control parameterization, optimizing over internal actions, external assistive-force modulation, and keyframe timing. Our method allows for emergent behaviors between keyframes, does not require advance knowledge of contacts or exact motion timing, supports the creation of physically impossible motions, and allows for near-interactive motion creation. The use of a shooting method allows for the use of any black-box simulator. We present results for a variety of 2D and 3D characters and motions, using sparse and dense keyframes. We compare our control parameterization scheme against other possible approaches for incorporating external assistive forces.
A functional skeleton transfer
(ACM, 2021) Musoni, Pietro; Marin, Riccardo; Melzi, Simone; Castellani, Umberto; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
The animation community has spent significant effort trying to ease rigging procedures. This is necessitated because the increasing availability of 3D data makes manual rigging infeasible. However, object animations involve understanding elaborate geometry and dynamics, and such knowledge is hard to infuse even with modern data-driven techniques. Automatic rigging methods do not provide adequate control and cannot generalize in the presence of unseen artifacts. As an alternative, one can design a system for one shape and then transfer it to other objects. In previous work, this has been implemented by solving the dense point-to-point correspondence problem. Such an approach requires a significant amount of supervision, often placing hundreds of landmarks by hand. This paper proposes a functional approach for skeleton transfer that uses limited information and does not require a complete match between the geometries. To do so, we suggest a novel representation for the skeleton properties, namely the functional regressor, which is compact and invariant to different discretizations and poses. We consider our functional regressor a new operator to adopt in intrinsic geometry pipelines for encoding the pose information, paving the way for several new applications. We numerically stress our method on a large set of different shapes and object classes, providing qualitative and numerical evaluations of precision and computational efficiency. Finally, we show a preliminar transfer of the complete rigging scheme, introducing a promising direction for future explorations.
Diverse Motion Stylization for Multiple Style Domains via Spatial-Temporal Graph-Based Generative Model
(ACM, 2021) Park, Soomin; Jang, Deok-Kyeong; Lee, Sung-Hee; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
This paper presents a novel deep learning-based framework for translating a motion into various styles within multiple domains. Our framework is a single set of generative adversarial networks that learns stylistic features from a collection of unpaired motion clips with style labels to support mapping between multiple style domains. We construct a spatio-temporal graph to model a motion sequence and employ the spatial-temporal graph convolution networks (ST-GCN) to extract stylistic properties along spatial and temporal dimensions. Through spatial-temporal modeling, our framework shows improved style translation results between significantly different actions and on a long motion sequence containing multiple actions. In addition, we first develop a mapping network for motion stylization that maps a random noise to style, which allows for generating diverse stylization results without using reference motions. Through various experiments, we demonstrate the ability of our method to generate improved results in terms of visual quality, stylistic diversity, and content preservation.
Recovering Geometric Information with Learned Texture Perturbations
(ACM, 2021) Wu, Jane; Jin, Yongxu; Geng, Zhenglin; Zhou, Hui; Fedkiw, Ronald; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
Regularization is used to avoid overfitting when training a neural network; unfortunately, this reduces the attainable level of detail hindering the ability to capture high-frequency information present in the training data. Even though various approaches may be used to re-introduce high-frequency detail, it typically does not match the training data and is often not time coherent. In the case of network inferred cloth, these sentiments manifest themselves via either a lack of detailed wrinkles or unnaturally appearing and/or time incoherent surrogate wrinkles. Thus, we propose a general strategy whereby high-frequency information is procedurally embedded into low-frequency data so that when the latter is smeared out by the network the former still retains its high-frequency detail. We illustrate this approach by learning texture coordinates which when smeared do not in turn smear out the high-frequency detail in the texture itself but merely smoothly distort it. Notably, we prescribe perturbed texture coordinates that are subsequently used to correct the over-smoothed appearance of inferred cloth, and correcting the appearance from multiple camera views naturally recovers lost geometric information.
Three Dimensional Reconstruction of Botanical Trees with Simulatable Geometry
(ACM, 2021) Quigley, Ed; Lin, Winnie; Zhu, Yilin; Fedkiw, Ronald; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
We tackle the challenging problem of creating full and accurate three dimensional reconstructions of botanical trees with the topological and geometric accuracy required for subsequent physical simulation, e.g. in response to wind forces. Although certain aspects of our approach would benefit from various improvements, our results exceed the state of the art especially in geometric and topological complexity and accuracy. Starting with two dimensional RGB image data acquired from cameras attached to drones, we create point clouds, textured triangle meshes, and a simulatable and skinned cylindrical articulated rigid body model. We discuss the pros and cons of each step of our pipeline, and in order to stimulate future research we make the raw and processed data from every step of the pipeline as well as the final geometric reconstructions publicly available.
Global Position Prediction for Interactive Motion Capture
(ACM, 2021) Schreiner, Paul; Perepichka, Maksym; Lewis, Hayden; Darkner, Sune; Kry, Paul G.; Erleben, Kenny; Zordan, Victor B.; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
We present a method for reconstructing the global position of motion capture where position sensing is poor or unavailable. Capture systems, such as IMU suits, can provide excellent pose and orientation data of a capture subject, but otherwise need post processing to estimate global position. We propose a solution that trains a neural network to predict, in real-time, the height and body displacement given a short window of pose and orientation data. Our training dataset contains pre-recorded data with global positions from many different capture subjects, performing a wide variety of activities in order to broadly train a network to estimate on like and unseen activities. We compare training on two network architectures, a universal network (u-net) and a traditional convolutional neural network (CNN) - observing better error properties for the u-net in our results. We also evaluate our method for different classes of motion. We observe high quality results for motion examples with good representation in specialized datasets, while general performance appears better in a more broadly sampled dataset when input motions are far from training examples.
Visual Simulation of Soil-Structure Destruction with Seepage Flows
(ACM, 2021) Wang, Xu; Fujisawa, Makoto; Mikawa, Masahiko; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
This paper introduces a method for simulating soil-structure coupling with water, which involves a series of visual effects, including wet granular materials, seepage flows, capillary action between grains, and dam breaking simulation.We develop a seepage flow based SPH-DEM framework to handle soil and water particles interactions through a momentum exchange term. In this framework, water is seen as a seepage flow through porous media by Darcy's law; the seepage rate and the soil permeability are manipulated according to drag coefficient and soil porosity. A water saturation-based capillary model is used to capture various soil behaviors such as sandy soil and clay soil. Furthermore, the capillary model can dynamically adjust liquid bridge forces induced by surface tension between soil particles. The adhesion model describes the attraction ability between soil surfaces and water particles to achieve various visual effects for soil and water. Lastly, this framework can capture the complicated dam-breaking scenarios caused by overtopping flow or internal seepage erosion that are challenging to simulate.
A Perceptually-Validated Metric for Crowd Trajectory Quality Evaluation
(ACM, 2021) Daniel, Beatriz Cabrero; Marques, Ricardo; Hoyet, Ludovic; Pettré, Julien; Blat, Josep; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
Simulating crowds requires controlling a very large number of trajectories and is usually performed using crowd motion algorithms for which appropriate parameter values need to be found. The study of the relation between parametric values for simulation techniques and the quality of the resulting trajectories has been studied either through perceptual experiments or by comparison with real crowd trajectories. In this paper, we integrate both strategies. A quality metric, QF, is proposed to abstract from reference data while capturing the most salient features that affect the perception of trajectory realism. QF weights and combines cost functions that are based on several individual, local and global properties of trajectories. These trajectory features are selected from the literature and from interviews with experts. To validate the capacity of QF to capture perceived trajectory quality, we conduct an online experiment that demonstrates the high agreement between the automatic quality score and non-expert users. To further demonstrate the usefulness of QF , we use it in a data-free parameter tuning application able to tune any parametric microscopic crowd simulation model that outputs independent trajectories for characters. The learnt parameters for the tuned crowd motion model maintain the influence of the reference data which was used to weight the terms of QF.
Neural UpFlow: A Scene Flow Learning Approach to Increase the Apparent Resolution of Particle-Based Liquids
(ACM, 2021) Roy, Bruno; Poulin, Pierre; Paquette, Eric; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
We present a novel up-resing technique for generating high-resolution liquids based on scene flow estimation using deep neural networks. Our approach infers and synthesizes small- and large-scale details solely from a low-resolution particle-based liquid simulation. The proposed network leverages neighborhood contributions to encode inherent liquid properties throughout convolutions. We also propose a particle-based approach to interpolate between liquids generated from varying simulation discretizations using a state-of-the-art bidirectional optical flow solver method for fluids in addition with a novel key-event topological alignment constraint. In conjunction with the neighborhood contributions, our loss formulation allows the inference model throughout epochs to reward important differences in regard to significant gaps in simulation discretizations. Even when applied in an untested simulation setup, our approach is able to generate plausible high-resolution details. Using this interpolation approach and the predicted displacements, our approach combines the input liquid properties with the predicted motion to infer semi-Lagrangian advection. We furthermore showcase how the proposed interpolation approach can facilitate generating large simulation datasets with a subset of initial condition parameters.
A GAN-Like Approach for Physics-Based Imitation Learning and Interactive Control
(ACM, 2021) Xu, Pei; Karamouzas, Ioannis; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
We present a simple and intuitive approach for interactive control of physically simulated characters. Our work builds upon generative adversarial networks (GAN) and reinforcement learning, and introduces an imitation learning framework where an ensemble of classifiers and an imitation policy are trained in tandem given pre-processed reference clips. The classifiers are trained to discriminate the reference motion from the motion generated by the imitation policy, while the policy is rewarded for fooling the discriminators. Using our GAN-like approach, multiple motor control policies can be trained separately to imitate different behaviors. In runtime, our system can respond to external control signal provided by the user and interactively switch between different policies. Compared to existing method, our proposed approach has the following attractive properties: 1) achieves state-of-the-art imitation performance without manually designing and fine tuning a reward function; 2) directly controls the character without having to track any target reference pose explicitly or implicitly through a phase state; and 3) supports interactive policy switching without requiring any motion generation or motion matching mechanism. We highlight the applicability of our approach in a range of imitation and interactive control tasks, while also demonstrating its ability to withstand external perturbations as well as to recover balance. Overall, our approach has low runtime cost and can be easily integrated into interactive applications and games.
Efficient acoustic perception for virtual AI agents
(ACM, 2021) Chemistruck, Mike; Allen, Andrew; Snyder, John; Raghuvanshi, Nikunj; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
We model acoustic perception in AI agents efficiently within complex scenes with many sound events. The key idea is to employ perceptual parameters that capture how each sound event propagates through the scene to the agent's location. This naturally conforms virtual perception to human. We propose a simplified auditory masking model that limits localization capability in the presence of distracting sounds. We show that anisotropic reflections as well as the initial sound serve as useful localization cues. Our system is simple, fast, and modular and obtains natural results in our tests, letting agents navigate through passageways and portals by sound alone, and anticipate or track occluded but audible targets. Source code is provided.

BibTeX (SCA 2021: Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation)

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