Imagine Internships

(2011-2012)

Advisors

Rémi Ronfard, IMAGINE team

Contact : remi.ronfard@inria.fr (04 76 61 53 03)

Context

Animating a virtual actor is a difficult task because of the many degrees of freedom that must be controlled simultaneously. Recently, Sreenivasa et al. have proposed to steer a humanoid robot by controlling its head in real-time. The robot then computes its movement to keep its balance while following the head motion driven by the user. In this Masters thesis, we would like to apply the same technique for controlling a virtual actor in real time with a simple "puppet" head controller.

Objectives

The thesis will pursue two complementary goals : video tracking, and steering of animation by head motion.
First, the candidate will adapt the techniques proposed by Sreenivasan et al. [1] for the case of a simple animated computer actor driven by direct and inverse kinematics. Using a variety of control trajectories for the actor's head, the candidate will compute the motion of the actor's skeleton/rig to preserve its balance, under a simplified physical model combining physics with keyframe animation [2,3,4].
Second, the candidate will build a simple video tracking system for recording the rigid motion of a tangible "puppet head" manipulated by the animator. This requires the tracking of 6 degrees of freedom. Following [5] we will use a combination of video cameras and augmented reality patterns to obtain a robust tracking of all parameters in real time. This will be used to demonstrate the animation system.
This internship is expected to lead to a PhD on the topic of virtual rehearsals for movie and theatre preproduction with multiple virtual actors under control of a skilled director.

Keywords

Virtual actors, video tracking, physically-based animation.

References

[1] Sreenivasa, Soueres, Laumond, Berthoz ; Steering a humanoid robot by its head. Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2009.

[2] Mira Dontcheva, Gary Yngve, Zoran Popovic. Layered Acting For Character Animation. ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2003).

[3] Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Michiel van de Panne. Robust Task-based Control Policies for Physics-based Characters. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009).

[4] Hironori Mitake, Kazuyuki Asano, Takafumi Aoki, Marc Salvati, Makoto Sato, Shoichi Hasegawa : 'Physics-driven Multi Dimensional Keyframe Animation for Artist-directable Interactive Character', Computer Graphics Forum, Vol.28, No.2, pp.279-287, 2009.

[5] Eric Woods, Paul Mason, and Mark Billinghurst. 2003. MagicMouse: an inexpensive 6-degree-of-freedom mouse. In Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and South East Asia (GRAPHITE '03).