AniMesh: Interleaved Animation, Modeling, and Editing

Paper: PDF (12 MB)

Presentation (SIGGRAPH Asia 2015): PowerPoint with videos (21 MB) | PDF (10 MB) | PDF with notes (11 MB)

Abstract:

We introduce AniMesh, a system that supports interleaved modeling and animation creation and editing. AniMesh is suitable for rapid prototyping and easily accessible to non-experts. Source animations can be obtained from commodity motion capture devices or by adapting canned motion sequences. We propose skeleton abstraction and motion retargeting algorithms for finding correspondences and transferring motion between skeletons, or portions of skeletons, with varied topology. Motion can be copied-and-pasted between kinematic chains with different skeletal topologies, and entire model parts can be cut and reattached, while always retaining plausible, composite animations.

Video (MP4, 18 MB):

Modeling the mantis (MP4, 17 MB):

BibTeX (or see the ACM Digital Library entry):

@article{Jin:2015:AIA,
 author     = {Jin, Ming and Gopstein, Dan and Gingold, Yotam and Nealen, Andrew},
 title      = {Ani{M}esh: Interleaved Animation, Modeling, and Editing},
 journal    = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
 issue_date = {November 2015},
 volume     = {34},
 number     = {6},
 month      = oct,
 year       = {2015},
 issn       = {0730-0301},
 pages      = {207:1--207:8},
 articleno  = {207},
 numpages   = {8},
 url        = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2816795.2818114},
 doi        = {10.1145/2816795.2818114},
 acmid      = {2818114},
 publisher  = {ACM},
 address    = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords   = {animation interfaces, mesh modeling, motion editing, motion transfer, shape editing, skeletal animation}
}