Abstract
Three-dimensional computer animation often struggles to compete with the flexibility and expressiveness commonly found in traditional animation, particularly when rendered non-photorealistically. We present an animation tool that takes skeleton-driven 3D computer animations and generates expressive deformations to the character geometry. The technique is based upon the cartooning and animation concepts of “lines of action” and “lines of motion” and automatically infuses computer animations with some of the expressiveness displayed by traditional animation. Motion and pose-based expressive deformations are generated from the motion data and the character geometry is warped along each limb’s individual line of motion. The effect of this subtle, yet significant, warping is twofold: geometric inter-frame consistency is increased which helps create visually smoother animated sequences, and the warped geometry provides a novel solution to the problem of implied motion in non-photorealistic imagery. Object-space and image-space versions of the algorithm have been implemented and are presented.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Autodesk: Maya. Autodesk Inc., San Rafael, CA (2006)
Blair, P.: Cartoon Animation. Walter Foster, Laguna Hills, CA (1994)
Bregler, C., Loeb, L., Chuang, E., Deshpande, H.: Turning to the masters: motion capturing cartoons. ACM Trans. Graph. 21(3), 399–407 (2002)
Brooks, B., Pilcher, T., Edgell, S., eds.: The Complete Cartooning Course. David and Charles, Newton Abbot, Devon, UK (2001)
Channey, S., Pingel, M., Iverson, R., Szymanski, M.: Simulating cartoon style animation. In: Proceedings of NPAR 2002, pp. 133–138. ACM, Annecy, France (2002)
Hart, C.: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Cartooning But Were Afraid To Draw. Watson-Guptill, New York (1994)
Hart, C.: How to Draw Animation. Watson-Guptill, New York (1997)
Hsu, S.C., Lee, I.H.H.: Drawing and animation using skeletal strokes. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 94, pp. 109–118. ACM, New York (1994)
Kawagishi, I., Hatsuyama, K., Kondo, K.: Cartoon Blur: Non-photorealistic motion blur. In: Proceedings of Computer Graphics International 2003, pp. 276–281. Tokyo, Japan (2003)
Lake, A., Marshall, C., Harris, M., Blackstein, M.: Stylized rendering techniques for scalable real-time 3D animation. In: Proceedings of NPAR 2000, pp. 13–20. Annecy, France (2000)
Lasseter, J.: Principles of traditional animation applied to 3D computer animation. Comput. Graph. (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 87), 21(4), 35–44 (1987)
Lee, S., Buscema, J.: How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Simon and Schuster, London (1978)
Li, Y., Gleicher, M., Xu, Y., Shum, H.: Stylizing motion with drawings. In: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation. Symposium on Computer Animation, pp. 309–319. Eurographics Association, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland (2003)
MacCracken, R., Joy, K.I.: Free-form deformations with lattices of arbitrary topology. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 96, pp. 181–188. ACM, New York (1996)
Noble, P., Tang, W.: Automatic expressive deformations for stylizing motion. In: Proceedings of GRAPHITE 2006, pp. 57–64. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2006)
Pomerantz, J.R.: The rubber pencil illusion. Percept. Psychophys. 33(4), 365–368 (1983)
Potmesil, M., Chakravarty, I.: Modeling motion blur in computer-generated images. Comput. Graph. (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 1983) 17(3), 389–399 (1983)
Rademacher, P.: View-dependent geometry. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 99, pp. 439–446. ACM/Addison-Wesley, New York (1999)
Sederberg, T.W., Parry, S.R.: Free-form deformation of solid geometric models. Comput. Graph. (Proceedings ACM SIGGRAPH 86) 20(4), 151–160 (1986)
Strothotte, T., Preim, B., Raab, A., Schumann, J., Forsey, D.R.: How to render frames and influence people. Comput. Graph. Forum 13(3), 455–466 (1994)
Strothotte, T., Schlechtweg, S.: Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics – Modeling, Rendering, and Animation. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2002)
Thomas, F., Johnston, O.: Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Abbeville, New York (1981)
Wang, J., Drucker, S.M., Agrawala, M., Cohen, M.F.: The cartoon animation filter. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Papers, SIGGRAPH 2006, pp. 1169–1173. ACM, New York (2006)
Wheeler, A., Thiel, J., Hart, G.: Cartoon motion blur for 3D animation. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Sketches, SIGGRAPH’06, p. 95. ACM, New York (2006)
White, T.: The Animator’s Workbook. Phaidon, London (1986)
Williams, R.: The Animator’s Survival Kit. Faber and Faber, London (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Noble, P., Tang, W. Automatic expressive deformations for implying and stylizing motion. Visual Comput 23, 523–533 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-007-0125-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-007-0125-8