Research Update

Alright, I'm just going to throw up a list of papers/articles that I'm going to take a look at. I've categorized them by topic and added a few words on why they'd be relevant to my project. I printed out the crucial ones (ie - Detecting Clones), but I'm still keeping tabs on the more tangentially relevant ones (ie - Crowd Rendering).

I want more on human perception and human modeling, but I think I have enough to read for tonight at least. I hope I'm going about this blog thing appropriately.


Modeling Humans

(Roughness Perception)
A Local Roughness Measure for 3D Meshes and its Application to Visual Masking
Guillaume Lavoué
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 5(4), January 2009, pp. 21:1-21:23.

(Survey of Software)
Arnold, D, Day, A, Glauert, J, Haegler, S, Jennings, V, Kevelham, B, Laycock, R, Magnenat-Thalmann, N, Maïm, J, Maupu, D, Papagiannakis, G, Thalmann, D, Yersin, B and Rodriguez-Echavarria, K (2008)
Tools for populating cultural heritage environments with interactive virtual humans, open digital cultural heritage systems.
EPOCH Conference on Open Digital Cultural Heritage Systems 2008, Rome, Italy.

(Painting Crowds)
Crowdbrush: interactive authoring of real-time crowd scenes
Branislav Ulicny, Pablo de Heras Ciechomski, Daniel Thalmann
2004 ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, July 2004, pp. 243-252.

(Levels of Detail)
Levels of Detail for Crowds and Groups
C. O'Sullivan, J. Cassell, H. Vilhjálmsson, J. Dingliana, S. Dobbyn, B. McNamee, C. Peters, T. Giang
Computer Graphics Forum, 21(4), 2002, pp. 733-742.

(Body Shape Breakdown)
Mario Gutiérrez, Alejandra García-Rojas, Daniel Thalmann, Frederic Vexo, Laurent Moccozet, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Michela Mortara, Michela Spagnuolo
An ontology of virtual humans
The Visual Computer, 23(3), March 2007, pp. 207-218.

(Photo vs. Antropometric)
Tianlu Mao, He Huang, Zhaoqi Wang,
"A Faster Method for Modeling Virtual Colony,"
vr, pp.239, IEEE Virtual Reality Conference 2004 (VR 2004), 2004


Differentiating Crowds

(Gaze-Contingent Rendering)
Hybrid Image/Model-Based Gaze-Contingent Rendering
Hunter A. Murphy, Andrew T. Duchowski, Richard A. Tyrrell
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 5(4), January 2009, pp. 22:1-22:21.

(Survey of Points to Differ On)
Clone Attack! Perception of Crowd Variety
Rachel McDonnell, Michéal Larkin, Simon Dobbyn, Steven Collins, Carol O'Sullivan
ACM Transactions on Graphics, 27(3), August 2008, pp. 26:1-26:8.


Controlling Crowds

(Affordance Theory)
Jason B. Cornwell, Kevin O'Brien, Barry G. Silverman, and Jozsef A. Toth.
"Affordance Theory for Improving the Rapid Generation, Composability, and Reusability of Synthetic Agents and Objects" Departmental Papers (ESE)..
May. 2003.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/6

(Path-Weighting)
Dynamically populating large urban environments with ambient virtual humans
M. Haciomeroglu, R. G. Laycock, A. M. Day
Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 19(3-4), 2008, pp. 307-317.

(Annotated Environments)
Doyle, P. and Hayes-Roth, B. 1998.
Agents in annotated worlds.
In Proceedings of the Second international Conference on Autonomous Agents (Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, May 10 - 13, 1998).
K. P. Sycara and M. Wooldridge, Eds. AGENTS '98. ACM, New York, NY, 173-180.
DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/280765.280797

(Social Force Model)
Social Force Model for Pedestrian Dynamics
Dirk Helbing and Péter Molnár
Phys. Rev. E 51, 4282–4286

(Flow and Continuum)
The Flow of Human Crowds
Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics
Vol. 35: 169-182 (Volume publication date January 2003)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.fluid.35.101101.161136)

(Data-Driven, From Video)
Group Behavior from Video: A Data-Driven Approach to Crowd Simulation
Kang Hoon Lee, Myung Geol Choi, Qyoun Hong, Jehee Lee
2007 ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, August 2007, pp. 109-118.

(Plausibility)
Crowds in Context: Evaluating the Perceptual Plausibility of Pedestrian Orientations
Christopher Peters, Cathy Ennis, Rachel McDonnell and Carol O’Sullivan


Animating Figures in Crowds

(Survey of Animation Methods)
Computer animation: from avatars to unrestricted autonomous actors (A survey on replication and modelling mechanisms)
Alfredo Pina, Eva Cerezo, Francisco J. Serón
Computers & Graphics, 24(2), April 2000, pp. 297-311.

(Motion LOD)
Level-of-detail for cognitive real-time characters
Christoph Niederberger, Markus Gross
The Visual Computer, 21(3), 2005, pp. 188-202.

(Tasks, VIBES)
Sanchez, S. Luga, H. Duthen, Y. Balet, O.
VIBES: Bringing Autonomy to Virtual Characters
details 2004, ISSU 3061, pages 19-30

(Continuum Animation)
Yin, K., Coros, S., Beaudoin, P., and van de Panne, M.
2008. Continuation methods for adapting simulated skills.
In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Papers (Los Angeles, California, August 11 - 15, 2008). SIGGRAPH '08. ACM, New York, NY, 1-7.
DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1399504.1360680

(Partial Motion)
Enriching a motion database by analogous combination of partial human motions
Won-Seob Jang, Won-Kyu Lee, In-Kwon Lee, Jehee Lee
The Visual Computer, 24(4), April 2008, pp. 271-280.

(Group Motion Editing)
Group Motion Editing
Taesoo Kwon, Kang Hoon Lee, Jehee Lee, Shigeo Takahashi
ACM Transactions on Graphics, 27(3), August 2008, pp. 80:1-80:8.

(Motion Patches)
Motion patches: building blocks for virtual environments annotated with motion data
Kang Hoon Lee, Myung Geol Choi, Jehee Lee
ACM Transactions on Graphics, 25(3), July 2006, pp. 898-906.

(Motion Capture)
Crowd motion capture
N. Courty, T. Corpetti
Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 18(4-5), 2007, pp. 361-370.

(Perceiving Smoothness)
Smooth Movers: Perceptually Guided Human Motion Simulation
Rachel McDonnell, Fiona Newell, Carol O'Sullivan
2007 ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, August 2007, pp. 259-270.

(Motivation Model)
A motivational model of action selection for virtual humans
E. de Sevin, D. Thalmann
Computer Graphics International 2005, June 2005, pp. 213-220.


Rendering Crowds

(Skin Texturing)
A Layered, Heterogeneous Reflectance Model for Acquiring and Rendering Human Skin
Craig Donner, Tim Weyrich, Eugene d'Eon, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Szymon Rusinkiewicz
ACM Transactions on Graphics, 27(5), December 2008, pp. 140:1-140:12.
HERE: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1410000/1409093/a140-donner.pdf?key1=1409093&key2=8361112621&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=70281040&CFTOKEN=59781860

(Billboards)
Geopostors: a real-time geometry/impostor crowd rendering system
Simon Dobbyn, John Hamill, Keith O'Conor, Carol O'Sullivan
ACM Transactions on Graphics, 24(3), August 2005, pp. 933-933.

(Real-Time Rendering)
Visualizing Crowds in Real-Time
F. Tecchia, C. Loscos, Y. Chrysanthou
Computer Graphics Forum, 21(4), 2002, pp. 753-766.

(Real-Time Rendering)
Real-time navigating crowds: scalable simulation and rendering
Julien Pettré, Pablo de Heras Ciechomski, Jonathan Maïm, Barbara Yersin, Jean-Paul Laumond, Daniel Thalmann
Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 17(3-4), 2006, pp. 445-455.


Props and Clothing

(Perception of LOD)
Perceptual Evaluation of LOD Clothing for Virtual Humans
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Steven Collins, Carol O'Sullivan
2006 ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, September 2006, pp. 117-126.

(Unified Body/Garment)
Generating unified model for dressed virtual humans
Seungwoo Oh, HyungSeok Kim, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, KwangYun Wohn
The Visual Computer, 21(8-10), 2005, pp. 522-531.


Implementations

(Roman Theatre)
Cain, K., Chrysanthou, Y., and Silberman, F. 2005.
A case study of a virtual audience in a reconstruction of an ancient Roman Odeon in Aphrodisias.
In ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Courses (Los Angeles, California, July 31 - August 04, 2005). J. Fujii, Ed. SIGGRAPH '05. ACM, New York, NY, 4.
DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1198555.1198674

Research Update

Time for an update. I've learned from experience that I work best after careful research and planning, so I'm perusing a number of papers and websites related to my topic. To make things easier, I have divided my research topics into categories:

1) Human physiology (phenotypes, averages, muscle locations).

This research topic hasn't been my top priority because I have a large number of artistic references already, mostly books (Eliot Goldfinger, Vlippu). However, given that these references are stylized, I need to look up more realistic data - preferably medical.

2) Picking out cloned agents in crowds.

C. O'Sullivan spoke about the Metropolis project here at Penn, and her studies implied that on the face when differentiating figures in crowds. However, the purpose of my project is to define people by body phenotype when facial detail is lost. I feel this information gives a psychological starting point to my research.

3) Current crowd simulation technology.

This includes creating, texturing, and animating crowds efficiently. I need to know how my models will fit into existing crowd simulation software. Much of the existing information leans towards animating (behavioral, annotated environment, motivation etc.) and rendering crowds, not modeling. Currently, I am reading Crowdbrush, but I'm looking for more sources. I also have also found a paper about rendering clothing using level-of-detail which will probably be of interest when combining props and figure models (again, O'Sullivan).

4) Writing Maya plug-ins.

While I'm incredibly comfortable using the software artistically, I need to figure out how to integrate my project with Maya. I've been able to locate some sites with advice, but this is mostly related to learning the Maya API. I believe I will wrap C++, but I am also looking up resources on MEL, just in case. Specifically, I need more resources on writing and reading OBJ and BVH files, the general file formats which I want to integrate into the plug-in.

5) Uses and comparisons of crowd simulation technology.

I have a lot of papers tagged which relate to the validity of crowds, especially in cultural heritage sites. While not as directly related to my modeling topic, I feel I should research and tailor my plug-in for potential uses (like people who aren't familiar with coding). In addition, a number of these papers also cover realism of crowd simulation which relates psychologically to my work.

I have a wide breadth of abstracts now, so it's time to begin filtering them and reading more in depth. Once I have a better understanding of current technology and algorithms, I will work on understanding the Maya plug-in API. Once that is taken care of, I will be able to diagram my software.

Weekly Update: Proposal

Things I Have Accomplished This Week:

This week, I have written my proposal and been granted permission to use this idea. The credit is not yet on PennInTouch. However, petition committee is on Wednesday, so I hope I'll be actually enrolled soon.

Things I Will Accomplish Next Week:

I aim to have a much more thorough literature search. Specifically, I will research BodyScapes and other recommended papers. I will also try to find anatomical resources guides outside of those from Figure Modeling (Eliot Goldfinger's book).

Abstract

A substantial demand exists for anatomically accurate, realistic, character models. However, hiring actors and performing body scans costs both money and time. Insofar, crowd software has only focused on animating the figure. However, in real life, crowds use props. A three-hundred person office will have people at computers, chewing pencils, or talking on cell phones. Many character creation software packages exist. However, this program differs because it creates models based on body phenotype and artistic canon. The same user-defined muscle and fat values used during modeling also determine animation by linking to tagged databases of animations and props. The resulting figures can then be imported into other programs for further stylization, animation, or simulation.

Introduction

Hi. This will be my blog for my senior design project on phenotype-based figure generation and linking motions for crowd simulation.