Contact Preserving Shape Transfer: retargeting motion from one shape to another

Jean Basset (1, 2) , Stefanie Wuhrer (1) , Edmond Boyer (1) , Franck Multon (2, 3)

1 MORPHEO - Capture and Analysis of Shapes in Motion
2 MIMETIC - Analysis-Synthesis Approach for Virtual Human Simulation
3 M2S - Laboratoire Mouvement Sport Santé

We present an automatic method that allows to retarget poses from a source to a target character by transferring the shape of the target character onto the desired pose of the source character. By considering shape instead of pose transfer our method allows to better preserve the contextual meaning of the source pose, typically contacts between body parts, than pose-based strategies. To this end, we propose an optimization-based method to deform the source shape in the desired pose using three main energy functions: similarity to the target shape, body part volume preservation, and collision management to preserve existing contacts and prevent penetrations. The results show that our method allows to retarget complex poses with several contacts to different morphologies, and is even able to create new contacts when morphology changes require them, such as increases in body size. To demonstrate the robustness of our approach to different types of shapes, we successfully apply it to basic and dressed human characters as well as wild animal models, without the need to adjust parameters.

Mots clés: Deformation Transfer; Motion retargeting; rigging-free animation; mesh deformation; shape transfer; surface-based retargeting; character animation

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Jean Basset, Stefanie Wuhrer, Edmond Boyer, Franck Multon. Contact Preserving Shape Transfer: retargeting motion from one shape to another. Computers and Graphics, 2020, 89, pp.11-23. ⟨10.1016/j.cag.2020.04.002⟩. ⟨hal-02613783⟩