This work addresses the development of a character animation editing method that accommodates animation changes while preserving the animator’s original artistic intent. Our goal is to give the artist control over the automatic editing of animations by extending them with artist-defined metadata. We propose a metadata representation that describes which aspects of an animation can be varied. To make the authoring process easier, we have developed an interface for specifying the metadata. Our method extracts a collection of trajectories of both effectors and objects for the animation. We approximate and parameterize the trajectories with a series of cubic Bézier curves. Then, we generate a set of high-level parameters for editing which are related to trajectory deformations. The only possible deformations are those that preserve the fine structure of the original motion. From the trajectories, we use inverse kinematics to generate a new animation that conforms to the user’s edits while preserving the overall character of the original.

The widespread availability of high-quality motion capture data and the maturity of solutions to animate virtual characters has paved the way for the next generation of interactive virtual worlds exhibiting intricate interactions between characters and the environments they inhabit. However, current motion synthesis techniques have not been designed to scale with complex environments and contact-rich motions, requiring environment designers to manually embed motion semantics in the environment geometry in order to address online motion synthesis. This paper presents an automated approach for analyzing both motions and environments in order to represent the different ways in which an environment can afford a character to move. We extract the salient features that characterize the contact-rich motion repertoire of a character and detect valid transitions in the environment where each of these motions may be possible, along with additional semantics that inform which surfaces of the environment the character may use for support during the motion. The precomputed motion semantics can be easily integrated into standard navigation and animation pipelines in order to greatly enhance the motion capabilities of virtual characters. The computational efficiency of our approach enables two additional applications. Environment designers can interactively design new environments and get instant feedback on how characters may potentially interact, which can be used for iterative modeling and refinement. End users can dynamically edit virtual worlds and characters will automatically accommodate the changes in the environment in their movement strategies.

We present an interactive design system that allows casual users to quickly create 3D-printable robotic creatures. Our approach automates the tedious parts of the design process while providing ample room for customization of morphology, proportions, gait and motion style. The technical core of our framework is an efficient optimization-based solution that generates stable motions for legged robots of arbitrary designs. An intuitive set of editing tools allows the user to interactively explore the space of feasible designs and to study the relationship between morphological features and the resulting motions. Fabrication blueprints are generated automatically such that the robot designs can be manufactured using 3D-printing and off-the-shelf servo motors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution by designing six robotic creatures with a variety of morphological features: two, four or five legs, point or area feet, actuated spines and different proportions. We validate the feasibility of the designs generated with our system through physics simulations and physically-fabricated prototypes.

Coloring books capture the imagination of children and provide them with one of their earliest opportunities for creative expression. However, given the proliferation and popularity of digital devices, real-world activities like coloring can seem unexciting, and children become less engaged in them. Augmented reality holds unique potential to impact this situation by providing a bridge between real-world activities and digital enhancements. In this paper, we present an augmented reality coloring book App in which children color characters in a printed coloring book and inspect their work using a mobile device. The drawing is detected and tracked, and the video stream is augmented with an animated 3-D version of the character that is textured according to the child's coloring. This is possible thanks to several novel technical contributions. We present a texturing process that applies the captured texture from a 2-D colored drawing to both the visible and occluded regions of a 3-D character in real time. We develop a deformable surface tracking method designed for colored drawings that uses a new outlier rejection algorithm for real-time tracking and surface deformation recovery. We present a content creation pipeline to efficiently create the 2-D and 3-D content. And, finally, we validate our work with two user studies that examine the quality of our texturing algorithm and the overall App experience.

Even though the human eye is one of the central features of individual appearance, its shape has so far been mostly approximated in our community with gross simplifications. In this paper we demonstrate that there is a lot of individuality to every eye, a fact that common practices for 3D eye generation do not consider. To faithfully reproduce all the intricacies of the human eye we propose a novel capture system that is capable of accurately reconstructing all the visible parts of the eye: the white sclera , the transparent cornea and the non-rigidly deforming colored iris . These components exhibit very different appearance properties and thus we propose a hybrid reconstruction method that addresses them individually, resulting in a complete model of both spatio-temporal shape and texture at an unprecedented level of detail, enabling the creation of more believable digital humans. Finally, we believe that the findings of this paper will alter our community's current assumptions regarding human eyes, and our work has the potential to significantly impact the way that eyes will be modelled in the future.