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Animating characters in Chinese painting using two-dimensional skeleton-based deformation

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Abstract

Chinese painting is always a kind of resource to explore ancient Chinese dynasties and the ideology of painters. Nowadays, more and more Chinese-antique museums have created corresponding animations from Chinese painting for representing daily life of ancient Chinese and providing immersive experience to attract visitors. However, it is not easy to produce animation sequences directly from Chinese paintings. It is laborious and time-consuming to build every motion of animated characters in Chinese painting. Since the irregular borders of characters in Chinese painting are torn and the connectivity of stroke line will be lost while implementing deformation. This research therefore presents a procedure of generating Chinese painting animation sequences to overcome these problems. It focuses on two technical issues: sample point processing and animation generation. Sample point distribution and allocation are the major tasks in sample pint processing. A point distribution method is proposed to preserve connectivity of stroke line of object and a weight scheme is implemented to decide control bone of individual sample points. For the stage of animation, the skeleton-based deformation is firstly used to generate key frames through user-provided skeleton. Then an interpolation method is exploited to create smooth animations. The proposed scheme could also be applied to multiple-character and multiple-skeleton animations.

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Acknowledgements

This work of Professor Damon Shing-Min Liu was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan under grant number MOST104-2221-E-194-042-MY2, while Dr. Ching-I Cheng and Ms. Mei-Lin Liu has no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Chung Cheng University, No. 168, University Rd., Min-Hsiung, Chia-Yi, Taiwan, 621

    Damon Shing-Min Liu & Mei-Lin Liu

  2. Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology, No. 1, Nan-Tai Street, Yungkang Dist., Tainan City, Taiwan, 710

    Ching-I Cheng

Authors
  1. Damon Shing-Min Liu
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  2. Ching-I Cheng
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  3. Mei-Lin Liu
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Correspondence to Ching-I Cheng.

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Liu, D.SM., Cheng, CI. & Liu, ML. Animating characters in Chinese painting using two-dimensional skeleton-based deformation. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 20343–20371 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-08842-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-08842-5

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