Bringing Clay Models to Life
Creating animated, 3-dimensional characters is difficult. Our goal has been to make this activity accessible to everyone. Â Â Having identified the different parts of a model, we can animate it appropriately in a virtual world.
Background & Objective: The 3D scanners on the market today are very expensive, and produce very precise 3D models. However, it is now practical to build very inexpensive 3D scanners, having certain limitations. Here we explored an entertaining application that a consumer-grade scanner might make possible. Our application was inspired by the ancient myth of Pygmalion, whose sculpture of a woman was brought to life by Venus.
Technical Discussion: The technical novelty in our system lies in our approach to model recognition and parsing, both of which are accomplished by comparing a set of parameterized object templates to a scanned clay model. The templates are deformed to match the model, and the matching score determines how the model is classified. Matching is performed against a total of 130 object templates, 10 from each of 13 categories (biped, quadraped, insect, chair, table, car, boat, bicycle, flyer, rocket, tree, house, and bridge). Once the best-matching template has been found for a given clay model, the match is used to parse the model into its constituent parts. For example, if a model is recognized as a biped, the match between the clay model and the biped template is used to identify the model voxels that constitute the head, arms, legs, and torso. Â Â We achieved our goal of bringing a clay model to (virtual) life automatically. The body measurements, masses, and moments of inertia were computed from the parse of one of the quadruped clay models. These values were passed as input to an adaptive control and simulation system for a four-legged robot, which adapted an existing control system to the dynamics of this particular clay model. The motion data computed by the simulation were then used to animate the object template, which in turn was used to animate the scanned volume by moving its voxels in concert with the linkages of the template to which they were assigned in the parsing phase.
Technology Areas:
Graphics
Off the Desktop Interaction and Display
Modification Date: June 13, 2008