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Controllable motion synthesis in a gaseous medium

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Abstract

The generation of realistic motion satisfying user-defined requirements is one of the most important goals of computer animation. Our aim in this paper is the synthesis of realistic, controllable motion for lightweight natural objects in a gaseous medium. We formulate this problem as a large-scale spacetime optimization with user controls and fluid motion equations as constraints. We have devised novel and effective methods to make this large optimization tractable. Initial trajectories are generated with data-driven synthesis based on stylistic motion planning. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is used during optimization to produce fluid simulations at a reasonable computational cost, while interesting vortex-based fluid motion is generated by recording the presence of vortices in the initial trajectories and maintaining them through optimization. Object rotations are refined as a postprocess to enhance the visual quality of the results. We demonstrate our techniques on a number of animations involving single or multiple objects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 N. Goodwin Ave., Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Lin Shi, Yizhou Yu & Christopher Wojtan

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin, 1210 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Stephen Chenney

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  1. Lin Shi
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  2. Yizhou Yu
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  3. Christopher Wojtan
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  4. Stephen Chenney
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Correspondence to Lin Shi.

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Shi, L., Yu, Y., Wojtan, C. et al. Controllable motion synthesis in a gaseous medium. Visual Comput 21, 474–487 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-005-0296-0

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