Introduction
The technical limitations of the animation pipeline have had a strong influence on the style of animation that can be achieved in a professional production environment. Our research strives to bypass these technical barriers with new algorithms that expand the designer's creative toolbox in terms of depiction, movement, deformation, stylization, control and efficiency. We not only allow artists to create new types of content but also provide new ways of interaction that make some tasks more effective, accessible and time-saving.
Topics
Character Animation
Character animation is a vital component of contemporary computer games and film productions. For animated movies in particular, a character's movements are critical to conveying personality and style. During the rigging stage, the range of meaningful deformations for a character is carefully designed by artists in terms of a low-dimensional set of intuitive control parameters. The character's movement is determined during the animation phase, when animators set values for the control parameters over time in order to bring the character to life and make it act.
Believable and compelling animation, however, requires careful consideration of the complex physical forces involved in movement in order to give weight and substance to an otherwise empty and weightless shape. We provide methods to design physically-plausible chracter movements, deformations and secondary-motions.
Interactive tools
Today, the prevailing interaction metaphor for animation and modeling interfaces is click-and-drag of individual controls. Unfortunately, this interaction metaphor does not accommodate some artistic principles and can be very counterintuitive to use. Our research seeks to provide artists with new ways of interaction that fit more precisely their need, as well as permit novice users to create satisfying content. In particular, we like to investigate sketch-based interfaces as a more natural way of editing 3D content, since it brings the user closer to traditional 2D sketching.
Stylization
The content creation pipeline in 3D computer graphics has been well established for over 20 years. In particular, the workflow to texture and render animated characters has barely evolved. Our research on animation stylization aims at designing interactive and intuitive tools for artists to depart from the classic pipeline and expand the range of possible visual styles for 3D characters.
Hand-drawn Animation
We investigate a set of novel digital tools for 2D Animation addressing the shortcomings of current digital support, representations and algorithms. In contrast to previous work, where automation has often been the goal, we focus on building tools that keep the artist as a central agent. We target automation of the most tedious tasks where the need for artistic interpretation is minimal, and otherwise aim for computer-assisted solutions geared to provide a similar experience as with traditional workflows augmented with algorithmic computation. With this goal in mind, we address the problems of digital representation of drawings, vectorization, segmentation, inbetweening and temporal noise control.
Publications
2021
D. Borer, L. Yuhang, L. Wülfroth, J. Buhmann, M. Guay
Rig-space Neural Rendering
Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP) (Virtual, February 8-10, 2021), pp. 300-307
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D. Borer, N. Isik, J. Buhmann, M. Guay
Augmenting Cats and Dogs
Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP) (Virtual, February 8-10, 2021), pp. 122-132
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2017
M. Zheng, A. Milliez, M. Gross, R. W. Sumner
Example-Based Brushes for Coherent Stylized Renderings
Expressive '17 Proceedings of the Joint Symposium on Computational Aesthetics, Sketch Based Interfaces and Modeling, and Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (Los Angeles, CA, USA, July 29-30, 2017), pp. 3:1--3:10
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L. Ciccone, M. Guay, M. Nitti, R. W. Sumner
Authoring Motion Cycles
Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (Los Angeles, California, USA, July 28-30, 2017), pp. 8:1--8:9
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M. Kapadia, X. Xianghao, M. Nitti, M. Kallmann, S. Coros, R. W. Sumner, M. Gross
PRECISION: Precomputing Environment Semantics for Contact-rich Character Animation
i3D '16 Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (Redmond, WA, USA, February 27-28, 2016), pp. 29-37
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F. Hahn, F. Mutzel, S. Coros, B. Thomaszewski, M. Nitti, M. Gross, R. Sumner
Sketch Abstractions for Character Posing
Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (Los Angeles, California, USA, August 7-9, 2015), pp. 185-191
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2014
A.Milliez, G. Noris, I. Baran, S. Coros, M.-P. Cani, M. Nitti, A. Marra, M. Gross, R. W. Sumner
Hierarchical Motion Brushes for Animation Instancing
Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Non-photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR) (Vancouver, Canada, August 8-10, 2014), pp. 71--79
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F. Hahn, B. Thomaszewski, S. Coros, R. Sumner, F. Cole, M. Meyer, T. DeRose, M. Gross
Subspace Clothing Simulation Using Adaptive Bases
Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (Vancouver, Canada, August 10-14, 2014), ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 105:1--105:9
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M. Lukac, J. Fiser, J.C. Bazin, O. Jamriska, A. Sorkine-Hornung, D. Sykora
Painting by Feature: Texture Boundaries for Example-based Image Creation
Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (Anaheim, USA, July 21-25, 2013), ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 146:1-146:12
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2012
G. Noris, D. Sykora, A. Shamir, S. Coros, B. Whited, M. Simons, A. Hornung, R. W. Sumner, M. Gross
Smart Scribbles for Sketch Segmentation
Computer Graphics Forum, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 31, no. 8, 2012, pp. 2516-2527
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S. Coros, S. Martin, B. Thomaszewski, C. Schumacher, R. Sumner, M. Gross
Deformable Objects Alive!
Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles, USA, August 5-9, 2012), ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 69:1-9
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F. Hahn, S. Martin, B. Thomaszewski, R. Sumner, S. Coros, M. Gross
Rig-Space Physics
Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles, USA, August 5-9, 2012), ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 72:1-72:8
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2011
G. Noris, D. Sykora, S. Coros, B. Whited, M. Simmons, A. Hornung, M. Gross, R. Sumner
Temporal Noise Control for Sketchy Animation
Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR) (Vancouver, Canada, August 5-7, 2011), pp. 93-98
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I. Baran, J. Schmid , T. Siegrist , M. Gross, R. Sumner
Mixed-Order Compositing for 3D Paintings
Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Asia (Hong Kong, China, December 12-15, 2011), ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 132:1--132:6
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J. Schmid, M. S. Senn, M. Gross, R. Sumner
OverCoat: An Implicit Canvas for 3D Painting
Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (Vancouver, Canada, August 7-11, 2011), ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 28:1-28:10
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2010
J. Schmid, R. Sumner, H. Bowles, M. Gross
Programmable Motion Effects
Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles, USA, July 25-29, 2010), ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 57:1-57:9
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B. Whited, G. Noris, M. Simmons, R. Sumner, M. Gross, J. Rossignac
BetweenIT: An Interactive Tool for Tight Inbetweening
Proceedings of Eurographics (Norrköping, Sweden, May 3-7, 2010), Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 605-614
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