Reconstructing Personalized Anatomical Models for Physics-based Body Animation

We present a method to create personalized anatomical models ready for physics-based animation, using only a set of 3D surface scans. We start by building a template anatomical model of an average male which supports deformations due to both 1) subject-specific variations: shapes and sizes of bones, muscles, and adipose tissues and 2) skeletal poses. Next, we capture a set of 3D scans of an actor in various poses. Our key contribution is formulating and solving a large-scale optimization problem where we compute both subject-specific and pose-dependent parameters such that our resulting anatomical model explains the captured 3D scans as closely as possible. Compared to data-driven body modeling techniques that focus only on the surface, our approach has the advantage of creating physics-based models, which provide realistic 3D geometry of the bones and muscles, and naturally supports effects such as inertia, gravity, and collisions according to Newtonian dynamics.

Petr Kadlecek (*), Alexandru-Eugen Ichim (*), Tiantian Liu, Jaroslav Krivanek, Ladislav Kavan. Reconstructing Personalized Anatomical Models for Physics-based Body Animation. ACM Transaction on Graphics 35(6) [Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia], 2016.  

Our special thanks belong to Mark Pauly for the useful discussions and ideas, as well as Sanchit Garg for helping with the skeleton rig modeling. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This research was supported by NSF awards IIS-1617172, IIS-1622360, the grant SVV 2016- 260332 and a gift from Activision. We thank TEN24 and their 3D Scan Store for the sets of detailed 3D scans used in our experiments.