Automatic expressive deformations for implying and stylizing motion

  • Authors:
  • Paul Noble;Wen Tang

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Teesside, School of Computing, TS1 3BA, Middlesbrough, Tees Valley, UK;University of Teesside, School of Computing, TS1 3BA, Middlesbrough, Tees Valley, UK

  • Venue:
  • The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Three-dimensional computer animation often struggles to compete with the flexibility and expressiveness commonly found in traditional animation, particularly when rendered non-photorealistically. We present an animation tool that takes skeleton-driven 3D computer animations and generates expressive deformations to the character geometry. The technique is based upon the cartooning and animation concepts of “lines of action” and “lines of motion” and automatically infuses computer animations with some of the expressiveness displayed by traditional animation. Motion and pose-based expressive deformations are generated from the motion data and the character geometry is warped along each limb’s individual line of motion. The effect of this subtle, yet significant, warping is twofold: geometric inter-frame consistency is increased which helps create visually smoother animated sequences, and the warped geometry provides a novel solution to the problem of implied motion in non-photorealistic imagery. Object-space and image-space versions of the algorithm have been implemented and are presented.