Planning Notes II

I realized my blogs are very much not "weekly." I just kind of post whenever I've finished something.

Here are some more moderately intelligible notes. They describe in detail the class structure of the plug-in - like what node possesses what and which methods call which inside each other.


I have to work on the soft selection and mesh manipulation algorithm, but after that, I'll be ready to put it all to computer (given that I have, already put it all to paper).

Here are the tasks I am giving myself, about one or two a week:

1. Do the plug-in writing exercise from my Maya plug-in writing class.
2. Create a functional CurvePair.
3. Make a TetraCurve where muscle curves affect fat curves.
   
4. Make the TetraCurve manipulate the mesh.
5. Model the figure. Going to start off with just the human male for now, since it's from the Goldfinger book.
6. Set TetraCurves up on the figure.
7. Create GUI.
8. Allow for importing and exporting of skeletons and meshes.

These are things I would like to add if I have the time.

1. Save and load from text files.
2. Gender toggles.
3. Viewer toggles (such as "hide curves").

Well, then. To work.

Research Update

I've been doing more research for another class I'm in, and it's turned up more interesting papers. These - especially those on modeling humans - have been much more relevant.

I'm not listing the papers I mentioned in the other post, but I'm still sorting the papers by topic.

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Modeling Humans

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(From Range Scans)
Exploring the space of human body shapes: data-driven synthesis under anthropometric control
Brett Allen, Brian Curless, Zoran Popovic
University of Washington

(From Range Scans)
Allen, B., Curless, B., and Popovic, Z. 2003.
The space of human body shapes: reconstruction and parameterization from range scans.
ACM Trans. Graph. 22, 3 (Jul. 2003), 587-594. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/882262.882311

(Volumetric Techniques)
Analysis of Human Shape Variation Using Volumetric Techniques
ZB Azouz, M Rioux, C Shu, R Lepage

(Head Modeling with Landmarks)
Head shop: Generating animated head models with anatomical structure
psu.edu [PDF]
K Kahler, J Haber, H Yamauchi, HP Seidel - 2002

(From 3D Scan Data with Templates)
Animatable Human Body Model Reconstruction
from 3D Scan Data using Templates

(From sizing parameters)
Seo, H. and Magnenat-Thalmann, N. 2003.
An automatic modeling of human bodies from sizing parameters. In Proceedings of the 2003 Symposium on interactive 3D Graphics (Monterey, California, April 27 - 30, 2003).
I3D '03. ACM, New York, NY, 19-26. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/641480.641487

(Sweep-based)
Dae-Eun Hyun, Seung-Hyun Yoon, Jung-Woo Chang, Joon-Kyung Seong, Myung-Soo Kim and Bert Jüttler
Sweep-based human deformation

(Anatomy-based)
Scheepers, F., Parent, R. E., Carlson, W. E., and May, S. F. 1997. Anatomy-based modeling of the human musculature. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and interactive Techniques International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 163-172.

(Morphable Faces)
Blanz, V. and Vetter, T. 1999.
A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces.
In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and interactive Techniques International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 187-194.

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Differentiating Crowds

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(Saliency-based Variation)
Eye-catching Crowds: Saliency based Selective Variation
Rachel McDonnell, Michéal Larkin, Benjamín Hernández, Isaac Rudomin, Carol O'Sullivan

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Animating Figures in Crowds

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(Perception of Motion)
Perception of Human Motion with Dierent Geometric Models
Jessica K. Hodgins, James F. O'Brien, Jack Tumbliny

(Sex Perception in Motion)
McDonnell, R., Jörg, S., Hodgins, J. K., Newell, F., and O'Sullivan, C. 2007.
Virtual shapers & movers: form and motion affect sex perception.
In Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (Tubingen, Germany, July 25 - 27, 2007). APGV '07, vol. 253. ACM, New York, NY, 7-10. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1272582.1272584

(Automatic Rigging)
Automatic Rigging and Animation of 3D Characters
Ilya Baran, Jovan Popovic

(Physics-Based Walking)
SIMBICON: Simple Biped Locomotion Control
Kangkang Yin, Kevin Loken, Michiel van de Panne

(Skin and Muscle Deformation)
Data-driven Modeling Skin and Muscle Deformation
Sang Il Park, Jessica Hodgins

(Joint-Aware Deformation)
Joint-aware Manipulation of Deformable Models
Weiwei Xu, Jun Wang, KangKang Yin, Kun Zhou, Michiel van de Panne, Falai Chen, Baining Guo

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Rendering Crowds

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(LOD Comparative Study)
LOD Human Representations: A Comparative Study
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Carol O’Sullivan

(Vein Textures)
Runions, A., Fuhrer, M., Lane, B., Federl, P., Rolland-Lagan, A., and Prusinkiewicz, P. 2005. Modeling and visualization of leaf venation patterns. ACM Trans. Graph. 24, 3 (Jul. 2005), 702-711.

(Skin Reflectance)
Analysis of Human Faces using a Measurement-Based Skin Reflectance Model
Tim Weyrich, Wojciech Matusik, Hanspeter Pfister, Bernd Bickel, Craig Donner, Chien Tu, Janet McAndless, Jinho Lee, Addy Ngan, Henrik Wann Jansen, Markus Gross

(Subsurface Scattering)
An Empirical BSSRDF Model
Craig Donner, Jason Lawrence, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Toshiya Hachisuka, Henrik Wann Jensen, Shree Nayar

(Rendering)
Drawing a Crowd
David R. Gosselin, Pedro V. Sander, and Jason L. Mitchel

(Face Cloning)
Hyneman, W., Itokazu, H., Williams, L., and Zhao, X. 2005. Human face project. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Courses (Los Angeles, California, July 31 - August 04, 2005). J. Fujii, Ed. SIGGRAPH '05. ACM, New York, NY, 5.

(Skin Texture)
Multispectral Skin Color Modeling
Elli Angelopoulou, Rana Molana, Kostas Daniilidis

(Skin Texture)
Skin Texture Modeling
OANA G. CULA AND KRISTIN J. DANA

(Skin Texture)
The secret of velvety skin
Jan Koenderink, Sylvia Pont

(Skin Texture)
KRISHNASWAMY, A., AND BARANOSKI, G. 2004. A
biophysically-based spectral model of light interaction with human
skin. Computer Graphics Forum 23, 3 (Sept.), 331–340.

(Face Cloning)
Realistic Human Face Rendering for “The Matrix Reloaded”
George Borshukov and J.P.Lewis

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Props and Clothing

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(Clothes)
Frederic Cordier, Hyewon Seo, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann,
"Made-to-Measure Technologies for an Online Clothing Store,"
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 38-48, Jan./Feb. 2003, doi:10.1109/MCG.2003.1159612

(Clothes)
Clothing the Masses: Real-Time Clothed Crowds With Variation
S. Dobbyn, R. McDonnell, L. Kavan, S. Collins and C. O’Sullivan
Interaction, Simulation and Graphics Lab, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

(LOD Evaluation for Clothes Perception)
McDonnell, R., Dobbyn, S., Collins, S., and O'Sullivan, C. 2006.
Perceptual evaluation of LOD clothing for virtual humans.
In Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Siggraph/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (Vienna, Austria, September 02 - 04, 2006).
Symposium on Computer Animation. Eurographics Association, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland, 117-126.

Planning Notes

I've read a lot more than I've needed to, I think, but it's given me a better grasp on currently available technology for human modeling: volumetric methods, template methods. Hyewon Seo, et al. even did "An Automatic Modeling of Human Bodies from Sizing Parameters" for a clothing story.

Most use CESAR data, so I've decided to take my project down a slightly different path. The thing is, CESAR scan data produces ridiculously high resolution models. More importantly, the resulting figures cannot be easily stylized (pushed beyond the available data set). My editable curves methods aims to allow artists to create stylized models, to fit provided skeletons, and accomodate lower resolutions.

These are my planning notes. They are relatively intelligible planning notes. The next step is to get them off the paper and into the proposal.

Sorry, 3DS Max users, but I've settled on writing on Maya plug-in. The GUI (and as much as possible) will be done with Maya's Python Commands. However, the data structures (such as bodyPart and triCurve) will be written in C++.

I have also broken down the figure into seventeen overlapping regions and demarcated important landmarks - specifically using terms from figure drawing classes.

Research Update

My research so far hasn't turned up what I'm looking for. I need to find more (or, perhaps, it doesn't exist).

Currently, the paper on ontology of humans paper has offered the best in terms of modeling, but most of it has been done using body scans and interpolating between that data, which doesn't allow for stylization. As for rigging, landmarks are then found in a double-pass, and a skeleton built from that landmark. They use H-ANIM skeletons. They also reference accessories which I am interested in (if not necessarily implementing). I think this is a good paper to consider when I design what my artistic models need.

O'Sullivan's work gives good reason for why my project would be needed: people distinguish using appearance. But it doesn't offer insight into what has been done in similar veins. Her motion research is a little outside of my scope, though. The only thing that concerns me is that the work proved pretty solidly that color is the distinguishing factor for clone recognition, so I don't know how much I should do with that. Luckily, she references a paper which she used to create a procedural texture for her human models. I need to find it. While this isn't within the scope of my senior design project, it could become the project for another class and be merged into my senior design.

I'm going to keep looking at papers, but I need to concentrate now on building the framework for my program. So, top priority is going to be writing a simple, "Hello World" Maya plug-in to familiarize myself with the API. Then, I'm going to post a thorough design for my plug-in.

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).