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Item c-Space: Time-evolving 3D Models (4D) from Heterogeneous Distributed Video Sources(The Eurographics Association, 2016) Ritz, Martin; Knuth, Martin; Domajnko, Matevz; Posniak, Oliver; Santos, Pedro; Fellner, Dieter W.; Chiara Eva Catalano and Livio De LucaWe introduce c-Space, an approach to automated 4D reconstruction of dynamic real world scenes, represented as time-evolving 3D geometry streams, available to everyone. Our novel technique solves the problem of fusing all sources, asynchronously captured from multiple heterogeneous mobile devices around a dynamic scene at a real word location. To this end all captured input is broken down into a massive unordered frame set, sorting the frames along a common time axis, and finally discretizing the ordered frame set into a time-sequence of frame subsets, each subject to photogrammetric 3D reconstruction. The result is a time line of 3D models, each representing a snapshot of the scene evolution in 3D at a specific point in time. Just like a movie is a concatenation of time-discrete frames, representing the evolution of a scene in 2D, the 4D frames reconstructed by c-Space line up to form the captured and dynamically changing 3D geometry of an event over time, thus enabling the user to interact with it in the very same way as with a static 3D model. We do image analysis to automatically maximize the quality of results in the presence of challenging, heterogeneous and asynchronous input sources exhibiting a wide quality spectrum. In addition we show how this technique can be integrated as a 4D reconstruction web service module, available to mobile end-users.Item Environment-aware Real-Time Crowd Control(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Henry, Joseph; Shum, Hubert P. H.; Komura, Taku; Jehee Lee and Paul KryReal-time crowd control has become an important research topic due to the recent advancement in console game quality and hardware processing capability. The degrees of freedom of a crowd is much higher than that provided by a standard user input device. As a result most crowd control systems require the user to design the crowd move- ments through multiple passes, such as first specifying the crowd's start and goal points, then providing the agent trajectories with streamlines. Such a multi-pass control would spoil the responsiveness and excitement of real- time games. In this paper, we propose a new, single-pass algorithm to control crowds using a deformable mesh. When controlling crowds, we observe that most of the low level details are related to passive interactions between the crowd and the environment, such as obstacle avoidance and diverging/merging at cross points. Therefore, we simplify the crowd control problem by representing the crowd with a deformable mesh that passively reacts to the environment. As a result, the user can focus on high level control that is more important for context delivery. Our algorithm provides an efficient crowd control framework while maintaining the quality of the simulation, which is useful for real-time applications such as strategy games.Item Stable Orthotropic Materials(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Li, Yijing; Barbic, Jernej; Vladlen Koltun and Eftychios SifakisIsotropic Finite Element Method (FEM) deformable object simulations are widely used in computer graphics. Several applications (wood, plants, muscles) require modeling the directional dependence of the material elastic properties in three orthogonal directions. We investigate orthotropic materials, a special class of anisotropic materials where the shear stresses are decoupled from normal stresses. Orthotropic materials generalize transversely isotropic materials, by exhibiting different stiffnesses in three orthogonal directions. Orthotropic materials are, however, parameterized by nine values that are difficult to tune in practice, as poorly adjusted settings easily lead to simulation instabilities. We present a user-friendly approach to setting these parameters that is guaranteed to be stable. Our approach is intuitive as it extends the familiar intuition known from isotropic materials. We demonstrate our technique by augmenting linear corotational FEM implementations with orthotropic materials.Item Interactive Low-Cost Wind Simulation For Cities(The Eurographics Association, 2016) Rando, Eduard; Muñoz, Imanol; Patow, Gustavo; Vincent Tourre and Filip BiljeckiWind is an ubiquitous phenomenon on earth, and its behavior is well studied in many fields. However, its study inside a urban landscape remains an elusive target for large areas given the high complexity of the interactions between wind and buildings. In this paper we propose a lightweight 2D wind simulation in cities that is efficient enough to run at interactive frame-rates, but also accurate enough to provide some prediction capabilities. The proposed algorithm is based on the Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM), which consists of a regular lattice that represents the fluid in discrete locations, and a set of equations to simulate its flow. We perform all the computations of the LBM in CUDA on graphics processors for accelerating the calculations.Item Multi-Domain Real-time Planning in Dynamic Environments(ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Association, 2013) Kapadia, Mubbasir; Beacco, Alejandro; Garcia, Francisco; Reddy, Vivek; Pelechano, Nuria; Badler, Norman I.; Theodore Kim and Robert SumnerThis paper presents a real-time planning framework for multicharacter navigation that enables the use of multiple heterogeneous problem domains of differing complexities for navigation in large, complex, dynamic virtual environments. The original navigation problem is decomposed into a set of smaller problems that are distributed across planning tasks working in these different domains. An anytime dynamic planner is used to efficiently compute and repair plans for each of these tasks, while using plans in one domain to focus and accelerate searches in more complex domains. We demonstrate the benefits of our framework by solving many challenging multi-agent scenarios in complex dynamic environments requiring space-time precision and explicit coordination between interacting agents, by accounting for dynamic information at all stages of the decision-making process.Item A Virtual Character Posing System based on Reconfigurable Tangible User Interfaces and Immersive Virtual Reality(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Cannavò, A.; Lamberti, F.; Livesu, Marco and Pintore, Gianni and Signoroni, AlbertoComputer animation and, particularly, virtual character animation, are very time consuming and skill-intensive tasks, which require animators to work with sophisticated user interfaces. Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) already proved to be capable of making character animation more intuitive, and possibly more efficient, by leveraging the affordances provided by physical props that mimic the structure of virtual counterparts. The main downside of existing TUI-based animation solutions is the reduced accuracy, which is due partly to the use of mechanical parts, partly to the fact that, despite the adoption of a 3D input, users still have to work with a 2D output (usually represented by one or more views displayed on a screen). However, output methods that are natively 3D, e.g., based on virtual reality (VR), have been already exploited in different ways within computer animation scenarios. By moving from the above considerations and by building upon an existing work, this paper proposes a VR-based character animation system that combines the advantages of TUIs with the improved spatial awareness, enhanced visualization and better control on the observation point in the virtual space ensured by immersive VR. Results of a user study with both skilled and unskilled users showed a marked preference for the devised system, which was judged as more intuitive than that in the reference work, and allowed users to pose a virtual character in a lower time and with a higher accuracy.Item Quaternion Space Sparse Decomposition for Motion Compression and Retrieval(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Zhu, Mingyang; Sun, Huaijiang; Deng, Zhigang; Jehee Lee and Paul KryQuaternion has become one of the most widely used representations for rotational transformations in 3D graphics for decades. Due to the sparse nature of human motion in both the spatial domain and the temporal domain, an unexplored yet challenging research problem is how to directly represent intrinsically sparse human motion data in quaternion space. In this paper we propose a novel quaternion space sparse decomposition (QSSD) model that decomposes human rotational motion data into two meaningful parts (namely, the dictionary part and the weight part) with the sparseness constraint on the weight part. Specifically, a linear combination (addition) operation in Euclidean space is equivalently modeled as a quaternion multiplication operation, and the weight of linear combination is modeled as a power operation on quaternion. Besides validations of the robustness, convergence, and accuracy of the QSSD model, we also demonstrate its two selected applications: human motion data compression and content-based human motion retrieval. Through numerous experiments and quantitative comparisons, we demonstrate that the QSSD-based approaches can soundly outperform existing state-of-the-art human motion compression and retrieval approaches.Item Brownian Dynamics Simulation on the GPU: Virtual Colloidal Suspensions(The Eurographics Association, 2015) Tran, Công Tâm; Crespin, Benoît; Cerbelaud, Manuella; Videcoq, Arnaud; Fabrice Jaillet and Florence Zara and Gabriel ZachmannBrownian Dynamics simulations are frequently used to describe and study the motion and aggregation of colloidal particles, in the field of soft matter and material science. In this paper, we focus on the problem of neighbourhood search to accelerate computations on a single GPU. Our approach for one kind of particle outperforms existing implementations by introducing a novel dynamic test. For bimodal size distributions we also introduce a new algorithm that separates computations for large and small particles, in order to avoid additional friction that is known to restrict diffusive displacements.Item Spatial Matching of Animated Meshes(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Seo, Hyewon; Cordier, Frederic; Eitan Grinspun and Bernd Bickel and Yoshinori DobashiThis paper presents a new technique which makes use of deformation and motion properties between animated meshes for finding their spatial correspondences. Given a pair of animated meshes exhibiting a semantically similar motion, we compute a sparse set of feature points on each mesh and compute spatial correspondences among them so that points with similar motion behavior are put in correspondence. At the core of our technique is our new, dynamic feature descriptor named AnimHOG, which encodes local deformation characteristics. AnimHOG is ob-tained by computing the gradient of a scalar field inside the spatiotemporal neighborhood of a point of interest, where the scalar values are obtained from the deformation characteristic associated with each vertex and at each frame. The final matching has been formulated as a discreet optimization problem that finds the matching of each feature point on the source mesh so that the descriptor similarity between the corresponding feature pairs as well as compatibility and consistency as measured across the pairs of correspondences are maximized. Consequently, reliable correspondences can be found even among the meshes of very different shape, as long as their motions are similar. We demonstrate the performance of our technique by showing the good quality of matching results we obtained on a number of animated mesh pairs.Item Linear-Time Smoke Animation with Vortex Sheet Meshes(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Brochu, Tyson; Keeler, Todd; Bridson, Robert; Jehee Lee and Paul KryWe present the first quality physics-based smoke animation method which runs in time approximately linear in the size of the rendered two-dimensional visual detail. Our fundamental representation is a closed triangle mesh surface dividing space between clear air and a uniformly smoky region, on which we compute vortex sheet dynamics to accurately solve inviscid buoyant flow. We handle arbitrary moving no-stick solid boundaries and by default handle an infinite domain. The simulation itself runs in time linear to the number of triangles thanks to the use of a well-conditioned integral equation treatment together with a Fast Multipole Method for linear-time summations, providing excellent performance. Basic zero-albedo smoke rendering, with embedded solids, is easy to implement for interactive rates, and the mesh output can also serve as an extremely compact and detailed input to more sophisticated volume rendering.