Jean-Christophe Nebel

V-Man: Creation of the Virtual Man Position: Principal Investigator Funding: EU (Framework 5) Duration: 2001-2004

Project description

The V-Man project aims to develop an intuitive authoring system allowing any kind of user, without any particular computer skill, to create, animate, control and interact with a new generation of 3D virtual characters: the V-Men.

The 3D-MATIC Research Laboratory is in charge of the creation of the virtual humans. The aim is to produce automatically 3D models of scanned people, which can be animated directly by commercial animation packages. The created virtual humans have to be indistinguishable from real humans and they should also be recognisable individuals. The models have to be segmented automatically (clothes and limbs). Moreover skin and soft tissue properties should be made available in order to ensure a realistic animation. These can be divided in 3 tasks:

• Task 1: Segmentation and Cloth extraction. Within this task, we will capture 3D data from real people. Using state of the art segmentation techniques completed by a confirmation step will be able to perform fully automatic accurate segmentations of full human bodies. Moreover we will generate 3D cloth models by subtracting scans of the same person with and without cloth.
• Task 2: Skin and Soft Tissue. Body composition will be evaluated from automatic measurements on the 3D model. Moreover that composition is going to be refined by analysing skin deformation between different positions. We will then be able to model the elasticity of the skin and the soft tissues for any vertex of the skin surface.
• Task 3: V-Man Creator Plug-In Development. This task aims at integrating the algorithms developed within tasks 1 and 2 into the V-Man Creator Plug-In which will be developed upon the V-Man SDK.

Research

Jump to:

• Range flow from stereo-temporal matching
• Automatic skinning from a scan sequence
• Conformation for generation of animatable scanned data (videos)
• Generation of 3D garment with texture
• Legal Assessment of Issues Regarding the Scanning of Individuals for the V-Man Project

• Range flow from stereo-temporal matching
  

  For more information, go to Publications

• Automatic skinning from a scan sequence
  

  (Blue: weight1=1, weight2=0 / Red: weight1=0, weight2 =1)

  For more information, go to Publications

• Conformation for generation of animatable scanned data
  

  Download videos showing animation of our characters using the V-Man system:
  

  

  For more information, go to Publications

• Generation of 3D garment with texture

  The generation and extraction of 3D clothes models, which is not possible with current state-of-the-art systems, is done by capturing a same individual in a specific position with and without clothing. A subtraction algorithm processes both scans, whose positions is adjusted using landmarks, to generate the 3D clothes models.

  

  Characters wearing 3D garments

  The process of texture generation is the following: using the given flatten mesh of a generic mesh and using a set of photographs which sre used as texture maps, the user sets a set of landmarks on the photographs corresponding to predefined landmarks on the flatten mesh. Then a warping procedure is operated so that the warped photographs can be mapped automatically on the generic mesh.

  

  Texture warping

  

  Character wearing textured 3D garment

  For more information, go to Publications

• Legal Assessment of Issues Regarding the Scanning of Individuals for the V-Man Project
  • Compliance with UK law
  • Requirements of UK data protection law
  • Comparison of German and UK law
  • Applicable law
  • Analysis of the Rights of a person on his/her own image (EU context)

  Download report.

Keywords

computer graphics, computer vision, simulation, skinning, 3D scanners, virtual actors  

Publications

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2003

• A New Automated Workflow for 3D Character Creation Based on 3D Scanned Data, A. Sibiryakov, X. Ju and J.-C. Nebel, LNCS 2897, Virtual Storytelling, O. Balet, G. Subsol and P. Torguet (Editors), pp 155-162, 2003 [PDF]
• V-Man Generation for 3-D Real Time Animation, J.-C. Nebel, A. Sibiryakov and X. Ju, A Symposium on Intelligent Motion and Interaction Within Virtual Environments, Poster presentation, London, UK, 15-17 September 2003, Sponsored by NASA Ames, UCL and RIACS, abstract [PDF], poster [PDF]

2002

• Range flow from stereo-temporal matching: application to skinning, J.-C. Nebel and A. Sibiryakov, IASTED International Conference on Visualization, Imaging, and Image Processing, Malaga, Spain, 2002 [PDF]