Controllable Deformable Animations

Deformation control results. (a) the original elastic body animation. (b) keyframe shapes modified by the user. (c) the deformation control result. (d) the trajectory control result.

There is a crucial demand in the computer animation industry to make animations that blend animator-specified expressive motion with physics-based realism. We propose a novel framework to create directable animation of elastically deformable objects. The directable animation is created with animator-specified keyframes and the motion trajectory of the deformable object, while maintaining a plausible realism. Our framework mainly consists of two complementary approaches. The first is a method to control the time-varying geometry of an elastic object, using a loose key-framing technique. In our keyframing, we introduce an FEM-based elastic deformation algorithm that allows us to rearrange the elastic object motion, guided by the shape or pose specified at each keyframe. The second is a motion compensation technique, which allows us to rearrange the physical behavior of elastically deformable objects under a user-specified trajectory. The animation examples demonstrate that our framework provides plausibly realistic deformation animations with greater controllability and usability than existing approaches.

Papers

  • Ryo Kondo, Takashi Kanai, Ken-ichi Anjyo: “Directable Animation of Elastic Objects”, Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2005 (Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A., 29-31 July 2005), pp.127-134, 2005. [paper (Adobe PDF) (3.5MB)]

Demonstrations

  • For SCA’05[wmv (31.0MB)]

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