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Now showing 1 - 10 of 55
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    A Survey on Reinforcement Learning Methods in Character Animation
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2022) Kwiatkowski, Ariel; Alvarado, Eduardo; Kalogeiton, Vicky; Liu, C. Karen; Pettré, Julien; Panne, Michiel van de; Cani, Marie-Paule; Meneveaux, Daniel; Patanè, Giuseppe
    Reinforcement Learning is an area of Machine Learning focused on how agents can be trained to make sequential decisions, and achieve a particular goal within an arbitrary environment. While learning, they repeatedly take actions based on their observation of the environment, and receive appropriate rewards which define the objective. This experience is then used to progressively improve the policy controlling the agent's behavior, typically represented by a neural network. This trained module can then be reused for similar problems, which makes this approach promising for the animation of autonomous, yet reactive characters in simulators, video games or virtual reality environments. This paper surveys the modern Deep Reinforcement Learning methods and discusses their possible applications in Character Animation, from skeletal control of a single, physically-based character to navigation controllers for individual agents and virtual crowds. It also describes the practical side of training DRL systems, comparing the different frameworks available to build such agents.
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    Implicit Formulation for SPH-based Viscous Fluids
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Takahashi, Tetsuya; Dobashi, Yoshinori; Fujishiro, Issei; Nishita, Tomoyuki; Lin, Ming C.; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael Wimmer
    We propose a stable and efficient particle-based method for simulating highly viscous fluids that can generate coiling and buckling phenomena and handle variable viscosity. In contrast to previous methods that use explicit integration, our method uses an implicit formulation to improve the robustness of viscosity integration, therefore enabling use of larger time steps and higher viscosities. We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to solve the full form of viscosity, constructing a sparse linear system with a symmetric positive definite matrix, while exploiting the variational principle that automatically enforces the boundary condition on free surfaces. We also propose a new method for extracting coefficients of the matrix contributed by second-ring neighbor particles to efficiently solve the linear system using a conjugate gradient solver. Several examples demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our implicit formulation over previous methods and illustrate the versatility of our method.
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    Eye-tracktive: Measuring Attention to Body Parts when Judging Human Motions
    (The Eurographics Association, 2015) Ennis, Cathy; Hoyet, Ludovic; O'Sullivan, Carol; B. Bickel and T. Ritschel
    Virtual humans are often endowed with human-like characteristics to make them more appealing and engaging. Motion capture is a reliable way to represent natural motion on such characters, thereby allowing a wide range of animations to be automatically created and replicated. However, interpersonal differences in actors' performances can be subtle and complex, yet have a strong effect on the human observer. Such effects can be very difficult to express quantitatively or indeed even qualitatively. We investigate two subjective human motion characteristics: attractiveness and distinctiveness. We conduct a perceptual experiment, where participants' eye movements are tracked while they rate the motions of a range of actors. We found that participants fixate mostly on the torso, regardless of gait and actor sex, and very little on the limbs. However, they self-reported that they used hands, elbows and feet in their judgments, indicating a holistic approach to the problem.
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    Film Directing for Computer Games and Animation
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Ronfard, Rémi; Bühler, Katja and Rushmeier, Holly
    Over the last forty years, researchers in computer graphics have proposed a large variety of theoretical models and computer implementations of a virtual film director, capable of creating movies from minimal input such as a screenplay or storyboard. The underlying film directing techniques are also in high demand to assist and automate the generation of movies in computer games and animation. The goal of this survey is to characterize the spectrum of applications that require film directing, to present a historical and up-to-date summary of research in algorithmic film directing, and to identify promising avenues and hot topics for future research.
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    Presenting a Deep Motion Blending Approach for Simulating Natural Reach Motions
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Gaisbauer, Felix; Froehlich, Philipp; Lehwald, Jannes; Agethen, Philipp; Rukzio, Enrico; Jain, Eakta and Kosinka, Jirí
    Motion blending and character animation systems are widely used in different domains such as gaming or simulation within production industries. Most of the established approaches are based on motion blending techniques. These approaches provide natural motions within common scenarios while inducing low computational costs. However, with increasing amount of influence parameters and constraints such as collision-avoidance, they increasingly fail or require a vast amount of time to meet these requirements. With ongoing progress in artificial intelligence and neural networks, recent works present deep learning based approaches for motion synthesis, which offer great potential for modeling natural motions, while considering heterogeneous influence factors. In this paper, we propose a novel deep blending approach to simulate non-cyclical natural reach motions based on an extension of phase functioned deep neural networks.
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    Improving Sampling-based Motion Control
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Liu, Libin; Yin, KangKang; Guo, Baining; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael Wimmer
    We address several limitations of the sampling-based motion control method of Liu et at. [LYvdP 10]. The key insight is to learn from the past control reconstruction trials through sample distribution adaptation. Coupled with a sliding window scheme for better performance and an averaging method for noise reduction, the improved algorithm can efficiently construct open-loop controls for long and challenging reference motions in good quality. Our ideas are intuitive and the implementations are simple. We compare the improved algorithm with the original algorithm both qualitatively and quantitatively, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved algorithm with a variety of motions ranging from stylized walking and dancing to gymnastic and Martial Arts routines.
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    State of the Art in Hand and Finger Modeling and Animation
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Wheatland, Nkenge; Wang, Yingying; Song, Huaguang; Neff, Michael; Zordan, Victor; Jörg, Sophie; K. Hormann and O. Staadt
    The human hand is a complex biological system able to perform numerous tasks with impressive accuracy and dexterity. Gestures furthermore play an important role in our daily interactions, and humans are particularly skilled at perceiving and interpreting detailed signals in communications. Creating believable hand motions for virtual characters is an important and challenging task. Many new methods have been proposed in the Computer Graphics community within the last years, and significant progress has been made towards creating convincing, detailed hand and finger motions. This state of the art report presents a review of the research in the area of hand and finger modeling and animation. Starting with the biological structure of the hand and its implications for how the hand moves, we discuss current methods in motion capturing hands, data-driven and physics-based algorithms to synthesize their motions, and techniques to make the appearance of the hand model surface more realistic. We then focus on areas in which detailed hand motions are crucial, such as manipulation and communication. Our report concludes by describing emerging trends and applications for virtual hand animation.
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    Introducing a Modular Concept for Exchanging Character Animation Approaches
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Gaisbauer, Felix; Agethen, Philipp; Bär, Thomas; Rukzio, Enrico; Jain, Eakta and Kosinka, Jirí
    Nowadays, motion synthesis and character animation systems are used in different domains ranging from gaming to medicine and production industries. In recent years, there has been a vast progress in terms of realistic character animation. In this context, motion-capture based animation systems are frequently used to generate natural motions. Other approaches use physics based simulation, statistical models or machine learning methods to generate realistic motions. These approaches are however tightly coupled with the development environment, thus inducing high porting efforts if being incorporated into different platforms. Currently, no standard exists which allows to exchange complex character animation approaches. A comprehensive simulation of complex scenarios utilizing these heterogeneous approaches is therefore not possible, yet. In a different domain than motion, the Functional Mock-up Interface standard has already solved this problem. Initially being tailored to industrial needs, the standards allows to exchange dynamic simulation approaches such as solvers for mechatronic components. We present a novel concept, extending this standard to couple arbitrary character animation approaches using a common interface.
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    Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Avril, Quentin; Ghafourzadeh, Donya; Ramachandran, Srinivasan; Fallahdoust, Sahel; Ribet, Sarah; Dionne, Olivier; Lasa, Martin de; Paquette, Eric; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    We present a general method for transferring skeletons and skinning weights between characters with distinct mesh topologies. Our pipeline takes as inputs a source character rig (consisting of a mesh, a transformation hierarchy of joints, and skinning weights) and a target character mesh. From these inputs, we compute joint locations and orientations that embed the source skeleton in the target mesh, as well as skinning weights to bind the target geometry to the new skeleton. Our method consists of two key steps. We first compute the geometric correspondence between source and target meshes using a semi-automatic method relying on a set of markers. The resulting geometric correspondence is then used to formulate attribute transfer as an energy minimization and filtering problem. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of source and target bipedal characters, varying in mesh topology and morphology. Several examples demonstrate that the target characters behave well when animated with either forward or inverse kinematics. Via these examples, we show that our method preserves subtle artistic variations; spatial relationships between geometry and joints, as well as skinning weight details, are accurately maintained. Our proposed pipeline opens up many exciting possibilities to quickly animate novel characters by reusing existing production assets.
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    Look me in the Eyes: A Survey of Eye and Gaze Animation for Virtual Agents and Artificial Systems
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Ruhland, K.; Andrist, S.; Badler, J. B.; Peters, C. E.; Badler, N. I.; Gleicher, M.; Mutlu, B.; McDonnell, R.; Sylvain Lefebvre and Michela Spagnuolo
    A person's emotions and state of mind are apparent in their face and eyes. As a Latin proverb states: ''The face is the portrait of the mind; the eyes, its informers.''. This presents a huge challenge for computer graphics researchers in the generation of artificial entities that aim to replicate the movement and appearance of the human eye, which is so important in human-human interactions. This State of the Art Report provides an overview of the efforts made on tackling this challenging task. As with many topics in Computer Graphics, a cross-disciplinary approach is required to fully understand the workings of the eye in the transmission of information to the user. We discuss the movement of the eyeballs, eyelids, and the head from a physiological perspective and how these movements can be modelled, rendered and animated in computer graphics applications. Further, we present recent research from psychology and sociology that seeks to understand higher level behaviours, such as attention and eye-gaze, during the expression of emotion or during conversation, and how they are synthesised in Computer Graphics and Robotics.