Jacobo Bibliowicz Schuster

Abstract:

We introduce staggered poses--a representation of character motion that explicitly encodes coordinated timing among movement features in different parts of a character's body. This representation allows us to provide sparse, pose-based controls for editing motion that preserve existing movement detail, and we describe how to edit coordinated timing among extrema in these controls for stylistic editing. The staggered pose representation supports the editing of new motion by generalizing keyframe-based workflows to retain high-level control after local timing and transition splines have been created. For densely-sampled motion such as motion capture data, we present an algorithm that creates a staggered pose representation by locating coordinated movement features and modeling motion detail using splines and displacement maps. These techniques, taken together, enable feature-based keyframe editing of dense motion data.

Abstract:

We present a method for browsing videos by directly drag-ging their content. This method brings the benefits of direct manipulation to an activity typically mediated by widgets. We support this new type of interactivity by: 1) automati-cally extracting motion data from videos; and 2) a new technique called relative flow dragging that lets users control video playback by moving objects of interest along their visual trajectory. We show that this method can out-perform the traditional seeker bar in video browsing tasks that focus on visual content rather than time.

Abstract:

We present a system for the automated rigging of human face models, providing a significant time savings for this arduous task. Our system takes advantage of previous work which deforms a reference facial surface to conform to new face models. In particular, we have matched our reference model to digitized human faces. We parameterize the construction of the reference rig on the surface topology of the reference model; thus, the rig can be procedurally reconstructed onto deformed copies of the model.
The animation parameters of our rig are based on the expressive muscles of the face. We present a novel skin/muscle model, based on wire deformers and point constraints, to implement this parameterization. The model supports any number of muscle contractions about a particular skin patch, yet gives the artist ultimate control over the shape of the deformation.
Finally, we present a flexible environment for loading, rigging, and animating new models quickly and effectively.