A hybrid method for real-time animation of trees swaying in wind fields

Trees are one of the most important elements of natural landscapes. Therefore, in computer graphics, there is a great demand for methods to realize the natural representation of trees in virtual landscapes in various fields such as the entertainment industry or environmental assessment in construction. Many studies have been made on techniques in which the shapes of trees are modeled but only a few studies have been reported on methods to incorporate the shapes with motions in a wind field. Most of these studies use physical simulation techniques based on the equations of motion to generate the branch motions and cannot realize the motions of individual leaves. In this paper, we propose a method to create the natural motions of individual leaves and branches swaying in a wind field. The proposed method uses a hybrid approach combining a stochastic method and a simulation method. The stochastic method is based on 1/f noise, which is observed in various natural phenomena, and provides natural motion to leaves and branches. In addition, a simple simulation method based on the spring model is applied to branches to enhance the reality of their motions. This method enables the real-time creation of the leaf and branch motions. Diverse motions according to tree species and shapes and wind conditions can be easily realized by controlling the parameters.     

Realistic animation of interactive trees

We present a mathematical model for animating trees realistically by taking into account the influence of natural frequencies and damping ratios. To create realistic motion of branches, we choose three basic mode shapes from the modal analysis of a curved beam, and combine them with a driven harmonic oscillator to approximate Lissajous curve which is observed in pull-and-release test of real trees. The forced vibration of trees is animated by utilizing local coordinate transformation before applying the forced vibration model of curved beams. In addition, we assume petioles are flexible to create natural motion of leaves. A wind field is generated by three-dimensional 1/f ^β noises to interact with the trees. Besides, our animation model allows users to interactively manipulate trees. We demonstrate several examples to show the realistic motion of interactive trees without using pre-computation or GPU acceleration. Various motions of trees can be achieved by choosing different combinations of natural frequencies and damping ratios according to tree species and seasons.     

Dynamic obstacle avoidance for real-time character animation

This paper proposes a novel method to control virtual characters in dynamic environments. A virtual character is animated by a locomotion and jumping engine, enabling production of continuous parameterized motions. At any time during runtime, flat obstacles (e.g. a puddle of water) can be created and placed in front of a character. The method first decides whether the character is able to get around or jump over the obstacle. Then the motion parameters are accordingly modified. The transition from locomotion to jump is performed with an improved motion blending technique. While traditional blending approaches let the user choose the transition time and duration manually, our approach automatically controls transitions between motion patterns whose parameters are not known in advance. In addition, according to the animation context, blending operations are executed during a precise period of time to preserve specific physical properties. This ensures coherent movements over the parameter space of the original input motions. The initial locomotion type and speed are smoothly varied with respect to the required jump type and length. This variation is carefully computed in order to place the take-off foot as close to the created obstacle as possible. Electronic supplementary material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at and is accessible for authorized users.     

Scalable real-time animation of rivers

Many recent games and applications target the interactive exploration of realistic large scale worlds. These worlds consist mostly of static terrain models, as the simulation of animated fluids in these virtual worlds is computationally expensive. Adding flowing fluids, such as rivers, to these virtual worlds would greatly enhance their realism, but causes specific issues: as the user is usually observing the world at close range, small scale details such as waves and ripples are important. However, the large scale of the world makes classical methods impractical for simulating these effects. In this paper, we present an algorithm for the interactive simulation of realistic flowing fluids in large virtual worlds. Our method relies on two key contributions: the local computation of the velocity field of a steady flow given boundary conditions, and the advection of small scale details on a fluid, following the velocity field, and uniformly sampled in screen space.     

Skeleton-driven surface deformation through lattices for real-time character animation

In this paper, an efficient deformation framework is presented for skeleton-driven polygonal characters. Standard solutions, such as linear blend skinning, focus on primary deformations and require intensive user adjustment. We propose constructing a lattice of cubic cells embracing the input surface mesh. Based on the lattice, our system automatically propagates smooth skinning weights from bones to drive the surface primary deformation, and it rectifies the over-compressed regions by volume preservation. The secondary deformation is, in the meanwhile, generated by the lattice shape matching with dynamic particles. The proposed framework can generate both low- and high-frequency surface motions such as muscle deformation and vibrations with few user interventions. Our results demonstrate that the proposed lattice-based method is liable to GPU computation, and it is adequate to real-time character animation.     

View-dependent pruning for real-time rendering of trees

The main problem in the real-time rendering of vegetation is the massive amount of primitives to be rendered. These primitives are needed to fully describe the geometry of the plants. However, some of them are not visible depending on the location of the viewer. This work focuses on this fact to interactively reduce the amount of geometry needed to represent the foliage through a view-dependent multiresolution scheme. Following a camera-dependent criterion, the less visible parts of the foliage are detected in real time, and rendered with a decreased level of detail for improving efficiency. This fact considerably reduces the extraction and the visualization time of the geometry that represents the foliage. The novelty of the presented method is that its design is oriented to being efficient on massively parallel architectures, such as the graphics processing unit. Moreover, we introduce a new management system for efficiently handling level of detail objects in order to improve performance for forest scenes.     

A deformable surface model for real-time water drop animation

A water drop behaves differently from a large water body because of its strong viscosity and surface tension under the small scale. Surface tension causes the motion of a water drop to be largely determined by its boundary surface. Meanwhile, viscosity makes the interior of a water drop less relevant to its motion, as the smooth velocity field can be well approximated by an interpolation of the velocity on the boundary. Consequently, we propose a fast deformable surface model to realistically animate water drops and their flowing behaviors on solid surfaces. Our system efficiently simulates water drop motions in a Lagrangian fashion, by reducing 3D fluid dynamics over the whole liquid volume to a deformable surface model. In each time step, the model uses an implicit mean curvature flow operator to produce surface tension effects, a contact angle operator to change droplet shapes on solid surfaces, and a set of mesh connectivity updates to handle topological changes and improve mesh quality over time. Our numerical experiments demonstrate a variety of physically plausible water drop phenomena at a real-time rate, including capillary waves when water drops collide, pinch-off of water jets, and droplets flowing over solid materials. The whole system performs orders-of-magnitude faster than existing simulation approaches that generate comparable water drop effects.     

Bilinear interpolation for facial expression and metamorphosis in real-time animation

This paper describes a new method for generating facial animation in which facial expression and shape can be changed simultaneously in real time. A 2D parameter space independent of facial shape is defined, on which facial expressions are superimposed so that the expressions can be applied to various facial shapes. A facial model is transformed by a bilinear interpolation, which enables a rapid change in facial expression with metamorphosis. The practical efficiency of this method has been demonstrated by a real-time animation system based on this method in live theater.     

SPH固流交互中的实时固体破碎动画模拟

目的 针对固流交互中的固体破碎现象模拟研究较少、物理模型复杂、多求解器耦合性差、真实感与实时性难以兼顾等问题,提出一种适用于光滑粒子流体动力学（smoothed particle hydrodynamics,SPH）固流交互统一粒子框架的实时固体破碎模拟方法。方法 首先,结合断裂力学理论与统一粒子框架下固体边界粒子的空间和物理特性,构建基于物理的能量分析模型。然后,通过实时分析固体与流体之间的能量转化和自身能量平衡,将满足条件的粒子作为破碎发生的启发点。最后,采用基于几何的碎块生成方法,将启发点集作为种子点构建Voronoi图,完成碎块的生成。为确保模拟系统实时性,将模拟系统进行并行优化并加载至图形处理器（graphics processing unit,GPU）并行执行。结果 通过在不同复杂度和粒子规模的实验场景中进行模拟得到的结果表明,本文方法能够稳定地模拟固体受到流体冲击后发生的破碎现象,破碎细节真实感良好,在百万级粒子规模下能够满足实时性要求,可大规模并行执行且GPU加速效果显著,加速收益随场景规模增大而增大。结论 与现有研究相比,本文方法充分结合物理与几何方法的优点,与SPH统一粒子框架具有更高的耦合性,能够稳定地模拟固流交互中的固体破碎现象,细节符合现实世界物理规律,真实感渲染效果良好,可应用于洪涝、海啸、溃坝和泥石流等自然灾害的交互式预演、电子游戏特效等领域。     

基于GPU的风中树木物理动画*

采用非均匀梁作为树枝物理模型,分析了梁的弯曲效应,推导出挠度曲线表达式,并对其运用多项式最小二乘法拟合,将拟合后的简洁表达式预计算于纹理中,有效降低了实时计算量。为平衡CPU与GPU的负载,设计了分层次的树木结构模型,将力学分析计算转移到GPU上进行,同时避免了将树枝分段计算导致段间断裂现象及分段过大引起模拟效果过于粗糙的缺点。实验表明,该方法能完全实时、真实地模拟出风中树木动画的物理效果,解决了目前树木物理动画速度太慢不能实时模拟的不足。     

树木的建模与实时渲染技术

详细论述了树木生成以及渲染的实现过程.描述了一个使用随机L-系统的树木建模方法,以及几何绘制和替代物渲染相结合的树木渲染方法,并讨论了树木阴影的生成.最后,使用VC++和OpenGL设计了一个树木的生成器和一个树木的渲染器,实现了树木的建模与渲染.程序的运行结果表明,该方法能够取得较好的渲染效率和不错的视觉效果.     

Decimation of human face model for real-time animation in intelligent multimedia systems

Animating a complex human face model in real-time is not a trivial task in intelligent multimedia systems for next generation environments. This paper proposes a generation scheme of a simplified model for real-time human face animation in intelligent multimedia systems. Previous work mainly focused on the geometric features when generating a simplified human face model. Such methods may lose the critical feature points for animating human faces. The proposed method can find those important feature points and can generate the feature-preserved low-level models busing our new quadrics. The new quadrics consist of basic error metrics and feature edge quadrics. The quality of facial animation with a lower-level model is as good as that of a computationally expansive original model. In this paper, we prove that our decimated facial model is effective in facial animation using a well-known expression-retargeting technique.     

Virtual marionettes: a system and paradigm for real-time 3D animation

This paper describes a computer graphics system that enables users to define virtual marionette puppets, operate them using relatively simple hardware input devices, and display the scene from a given viewpoint on the computer screen. This computerized marionette theater has the potential to become a computer game for children, an interaction tool over the Internet, enabling the creation of simultaneously viewed and operated marionette show by users on the World Wide Web, and, most importantly, a versatile and efficient professional animation system.     

Graphical animation as a form of prototyping real-time software systems

An analysis of prototyping of embedded Real-Time Systems by means of graphical animation techniques is presented. We analyze the fundamental characteristics of prototyping and their relation to animation mechanisms. We show that animation strongly inherits certain benefits of prototyping while at the same time animation is able to alleviate some of the drawbacks of prototyping. A survey of known visualization techniques for real-time system animation is presented with an assessment to their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the animation approach taken in Esprit project no. 5570, IPTES, is described. Our approach is unique in enabling animation of heterogeneous system models, i.e., combinations of submodels belonging to different levels of abstraction.     

On the construction of a well-conditioned basis for the projection decomposition method

An algorithm for the construction of well-conditioned bases for the Projection Decomposition method is proposed. Piecewise-polynomial well-conditioned bases providing a high accuracy of PDM-approximations are considered. Numerical results on the Helmholtz equation for the cases of regular and singular solutions are presented. This research has been carried out with the support of the Sardinia Regional Authorities     

An iterative approach to dynamic simulation of 3-D rigid-body motions for real-time interactive computer animation

A method is presented for approximating the motions of linked 3-dimensional rigid body systems that may be applied in the context of interactive motion specification for computer animation. The method is based on decoupling the ballistic (free) component of the motion of the points that constitute the solid, and the component due to the shape constraint of the solid. This allows for a conceptually simple and computationally efficient algorithm for motion specification.     

Combined projection and kernel basis functions for classification in evolutionary neural networks

This paper proposes a hybrid neural network model using a possible combination of different transfer projection functions (sigmoidal unit, SU, product unit, PU) and kernel functions (radial basis function, RBF) in the hidden layer of a feed-forward neural network. An evolutionary algorithm is adapted to this model and applied for learning the architecture, weights and node typology. Three different combined basis function models are proposed with all the different pairs that can be obtained with SU, PU and RBF nodes: product–sigmoidal unit (PSU) neural networks, product–radial basis function (PRBF) neural networks, and sigmoidal–radial basis function (SRBF) neural networks; and these are compared to the corresponding pure models: product unit neural network (PUNN), multilayer perceptron (MLP) and the RBF neural network. The proposals are tested using ten benchmark classification problems from well known machine learning problems. Combined functions using projection and kernel functions are found to be better than pure basis functions for the task of classification in several datasets.     

Self-organizing radial basis function network for real-time approximation of continuous-time dynamical systems

Real-time approximators for continuous-time dynamical systems with many inputs are presented. These approximators employ a novel self-organizing radial basis function (RBF) network, which varies its structure dynamically to keep the prescribed approximation accuracy. The RBFs can be added or removed online in order to achieve the appropriate network complexity for the real-time approximation of the dynamical systems and to maintain the overall computational efficiency. The performance of this variable structure RBF network approximator with both Gaussian RBF (GRBF) and raised-cosine RBF (RCRBF) is analyzed. The compact support of RCRBF enables faster training and easier output evaluation of the network than that of the network with GRBF. The proposed real-time self-organizing RBF network approximator is then employed to approximate both linear and nonlinear dynamical systems to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed approximation scheme, especially for higher order dynamical systems. The uniform ultimate boundedness of the approximation error is proved using the second method of Lyapunov.