Animation of Virtual Worlds

M2R - MOSIG

François Faure, Lionel Reveret, Stéphane Redon,

Summary

This lecture covers the main classical animation techniques of 3D graphical scenes.

We consider the modeling and the animation of a virtual character. Starting from a basic articulated skeleton with joint angles, we progressively introduce sophisticated modeling and animation techniques. Physically based animation and real-time constraints for video games will also be presented.

We alternate lectures and lab sessions. Lab sessions are based on Maya and OpenGL/C++ programming.

Topics:

• Direct and inverse kinematics (Lionel Revéret)
• Deformable models, skinning, morphing (Lionel Revéret)
• Motion capture and retargetting (Lionel Revéret)
• Introduction to physically based animation
  
• Advancced physically based animation (Stéphane Redon)
  

Bibliography

• Baraff and Witkin's Lecture Notes on Physically Based Modeling
• Links to OpenInventor
• “Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation and Video Games”, Alberto Menach, (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers)
• « Physics-Based Animation », Erleben, Sporring, Henriksen, Dohlmann, (Charles River Media).

Organization

1. Kinematics-based animation (Lionel Reveret)
2. Physically-based deformable objects (François Faure)
3. Rigid bodies and collision detection (Stéphane Redon)
4. Presentation of articles

Marks are based on a written exam and presentation of articles. 15 minutes per talk + 5 minutes of questions. Here is a non-exaustive list of interesting papers on physically based animation:

• Large Steps in Cloth Simulation
• Robust treatment of collisions, contact and friction for cloth animation
• Nonconvex rigid bodies with stacking
• Interactive virtual materials
• Meshless deformations based on shape matching
• Arbitrary Cutting of Deformable Tetrahedralized Objects
• Hybrid Simulation of Deformable Solids
• Practical physics for articulated characters. E Kokkevis - Proc. of GDC, 2004
• A Divide-and-Conquer Articulated-Body Algorithm for Parallel O(log(n)) Calculation of Rigid-Body Dynamics. Part 1: Basic Algorithm. Roy Featherstone. The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 18, No. 9, 867-875 (1999).

Make sure to clearly present:

• the problem to solve
• the state of the art
• the contribution
• the limitations and possible future work (your opinion)

Illustrations

These images show examples of the topics discussed in the lecture.

Motion capture and re-use

Cloth modeling and animation

Hair modeling and animation

Large animated natural scenes

Physicall-based animation

Surgery simulation