BetweenIT: An Interactive Tool for Tight Inbetweening

The generation of inbetween frames that interpolate a given set of key frames is a major component in the production of a 2D feature animation. Our objective is to considerably reduce the cost of the inbetweening phase by offering an intuitive and effective interactive environment that automates inbetweening when possible while allowing the artist to guide, complement, or override the results. Tight inbetweens, which interpolate similar key frames, are particularly time‐consuming and tedious to draw. Therefore, we focus on automating these high‐precision and expensive portions of the process. We have designed a set of user‐guided semi‐automatic techniques that fit well with current practice and minimize the number of required artist‐gestures. We present a novel technique for stroke interpolation from only two keys which combines a stroke motion constructed from logarithmic spiral vertex trajectories with a stroke deformation based on curvature averaging and twisting warps. We discuss our system in the context of a feature animation production environment and evaluate our approach with real production data.     

Soft Folding

We introduce soft folding, a new interactive method for designing and exploring thin‐plate forms. A user specifies sharp and soft folds as two‐dimensional(2D) curves on a flat sheet, along with the fold magnitude and sharpness of each. Then, based on the soft folds, the system computes the three‐dimensional(3D) folded shape. Internally, the system first computes a fold field, which defines local folding operations on a flat sheet. A fold field is a generalization of a discrete fold graph in origami, replacing a graph with sharp folds with a continuous field with soft folds. Next, local patches are folded independently according to the fold field. Finally, a globally folded 3D shape is obtained by assembling the locally folded patches. This algorithm computes an approximation of 3D developable surfaces with user‐defined soft folds at an interactive speed. The user can later apply nonlinear physical simulation to generate more realistic results. Experimental results demonstrated that soft folding is effective for producing complex folded shapes with controllable sharpness.     

Partial Shape Matching Using Transformation Parameter Similarity

In this paper, we present a method for non‐rigid, partial shape matching in vector graphics. Given a user‐specified query region in a 2D shape, similar regions are found, even if they are non‐linearly distorted. Furthermore, a non‐linear mapping is established between the query regions and these matches, which allows the automatic transfer of editing operations such as texturing. This is achieved by a two‐step approach. First, pointwise correspondences between the query region and the whole shape are established. The transformation parameters of these correspondences are registered in an appropriate transformation space. For transformations between similar regions, these parameters form surfaces in transformation space, which are extracted in the second step of our method. The extracted regions may be related to the query region by a non‐rigid transform, enabling non‐rigid shape matching.     

Mesh Decomposition with Cross‐Boundary Brushes

We present a new intuitive UI, which we call cross‐boundary brushes, for interactive mesh decomposition. The user roughly draws one or more strokes across a desired cut and our system automatically returns a best cut running through all the strokes. By the different natures of part components (i.e., semantic parts) and patch components (i.e., flatter surface patches) in general models, we design two corresponding brushes: part‐brush and patch‐brush. These two types of brushes share a common user interface, enabling easy switch between them. The part‐brush executes a cut along an isoline of a harmonic field driven by the user‐specified strokes. We show that the inherent smoothness of the harmonic field together with a carefully designed isoline selection scheme lead to segmentation results that are insensitive to noise, pose, tessellation and variation in user's strokes. Our patch‐brush uses a novel facet‐based surface metric that alleviates sensitivity to noise and fine details common in region‐growing algorithms. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our cutting tools can produce user‐desired segmentations for a wide variety of models even with single strokes. We also show that our tools outperform the state‐of‐art interactive segmentation tools in terms of ease of use and segmentation quality.     

Scale Normalization for Isometric Shape Matching

We address the scale problem inherent to isometric shape correspondence in a combinatorial matching framework. We consider a particular setting of the general correspondence problem where one of the two shapes to be matched is an isometric (or nearly isometric) part of the other up to an arbitrary scale. We resolve the scale ambiguity by finding a coarse matching between shape extremities based on a novel scale‐invariant isometric distortion measure. The proposed algorithm also supports (partial) dense matching, that alleviates the symmetric flip problem due to initial coarse sampling. We test the performance of our matching algorithm on several shape datasets in comparison to state of the art. Our method proves useful, not only for partial matching, but also for complete matching of semantically similar hybrid shape pairs whose maximum geodesic distances may not be compatible, a case that would fail most of the conventional isometric shape matchers.     

An Example-based Procedural System for Element Arrangement

We present a method for synthesizing two dimensional (2D) element arrangements from an example. The main idea is to combine texture synthesis techniques based‐on a local neighborhood comparison and procedural modeling systems based‐on local growth. Given a user‐specified reference pattern, our system analyzes neigh‐borhood information of each element by constructing connectivity. Our synthesis process starts with a single seed and progressively places elements one by one by searching a reference element which has local features that are the most similar to the target place of the synthesized pattern. To support creative design activities, we introduce three types of interaction for controlling global features of the resulting pattern, namely a spray tool, a flow field tool, and a boundary tool. We also introduce a global optimization process that helps to avoid local error concentrations. We illustrate the feasibility of our method by creating several types of 2D patterns.     

Surface Patches from Unorganized Space Curves

Recent 3D sketch tools produce networks of three‐space curves that suggest the contours of shapes. The shapes may be non‐manifold, closed three‐dimensional, open two‐dimensional, or mixed. We describe a system that automatically generates intuitively appealing piecewise‐smooth surfaces from such a curve network, and an intelligent user interface for modifying the automatically chosen surface patches. Both the automatic and the semi‐automatic parts of the system use a linear algebra representation of the set of surface patches to track the topology. On complicated inputs from ILoveSketch [ [BBS08] ], our system allows the user to build the desired surface with just a few mouse‐clicks.     

Image‐Based Edge Bundles: Simplified Visualization of Large Graphs

We present a new approach aimed at understanding the structure of connections in edge‐bundling layouts. We combine the advantages of edge bundles with a bundle‐centric simplified visual representation of a graph's structure. For this, we first compute a hierarchical edge clustering of a given graph layout which groups similar edges together. Next, we render clusters at a user‐selected level of detail using a new image‐based technique that combines distance‐based splatting and shape skeletonization. The overall result displays a given graph as a small set of overlapping shaded edge bundles. Luminance, saturation, hue, and shading encode edge density, edge types, and edge similarity. Finally, we add brushing and a new type of semantic lens to help navigation where local structures overlap. We illustrate the proposed method on several real‐world graph datasets.     

Interactive Cover Design Considering Physical Constraints

We developed an interactive system to design a customized cover for a given three‐dimensional (3D) object such as a camera, teapot, or car. The system first computes the convex hull of the input geometry. The user segments it into several cloth patches by drawing on the 3D surface. This paper provides two technical contributions. First, it introduces a specialized flattening algorithm for cover patches. It makes each two‐dimensional edge in the flattened pattern equal to or longer than the original 3D edge; a smaller patch would fail to cover the object, and a larger patch would result in extra wrinkles. Second, it introduces a mechanism to verify that the user‐specified opening would be large enough for the object to be removed. Starting with the initial configuration, the system virtually “pulls” the object out of the cover while avoiding excessive stretching of cloth patches. We used the system to design real covers and confirmed that it functions as intended.     

Structure Preserving Manipulation and Interpolation for Multi‐element 2D Shapes

This paper presents a method that generates natural and intuitive deformations via direct manipulation and smooth interpolation for multi‐element 2D shapes. Observing that the structural relationships between different parts of a multi‐element 2D shape are important for capturing its feature semantics, we introduce a simple structure called a feature frame to represent such relationships. A constrained optimization is solved for shape manipulation to find optimal deformed shapes under user‐specified handle constraints. Based on the feature frame, local feature preservation and structural relationship maintenance are directly encoded into the objective function. Beyond deforming a given multi‐element 2D shape into a new one at each key frame, our method can automatically generate a sequence of natural intermediate deformations by interpolating the shapes between the key frames. The method is computationally efficient, allowing real‐time manipulation and interpolation, as well as generating natural and visually plausible results.     

A Local/Global Approach to Mesh Parameterization

We present a novel approach to parameterize a mesh with disk topology to the plane in a shape‐preserving manner. Our key contribution is a local/global algorithm, which combines a local mapping of each 3D triangle to the plane, using transformations taken from a restricted set, with a global “stitch” operation of all triangles, involving a sparse linear system. The local transformations can be taken from a variety of families, e.g. similarities or rotations, generating different types of parameterizations. In the first case, the parameterization tries to force each 2D triangle to be an as‐similar‐as‐possible version of its 3D counterpart. This is shown to yield results identical to those of the LSCM algorithm. In the second case, the parameterization tries to force each 2D triangle to be an as‐rigid‐as‐possible version of its 3D counterpart. This approach preserves shape as much as possible. It is simple, effective, and fast, due to pre‐factoring of the linear system involved in the global phase. Experimental results show that our approach provides almost isometric parameterizations and obtains more shape‐preserving results than other state‐of‐the‐art approaches. We present also a more general “hybrid” parameterization model which provides a continuous spectrum of possibilities, controlled by a single parameter. The two cases described above lie at the two ends of the spectrum. We generalize our local/global algorithm to compute these parameterizations. The local phase may also be accelerated by parallelizing the independent computations per triangle.     

Semi‐Stochastic Tilings for Example‐Based Texture Synthesis

We investigate semi‐stochastic tilings based on Wang or corner tiles for the real‐time synthesis of example‐based textures. In particular, we propose two new tiling approaches: (1) to replace stochastic tilings with pseudo‐random tilings based on the Halton low‐discrepancy sequence, and (2) to allow the controllable generation of tilings based on a user‐provided probability distribution. Our first method prevents local repetition of texture content as common with stochastic approaches and yields better results with smaller sets of utilized tiles. Our second method allows to directly influence the synthesis result which—in combination with an enhanced tile construction method that merges multiple source textures—extends synthesis tasks to globally‐varying textures. We show that both methods can be implemented very efficiently in connection with tile‐based texture mapping and also present a general rule that allows to significantly reduce resulting tile sets.     

User‐Assisted Video Stabilization

We present a user‐assisted video stabilization algorithm that is able to stabilize challenging videos when state‐of‐the‐art automatic algorithms fail to generate a satisfactory result. Current methods do not give the user any control over the look of the final result. Users either have to accept the stabilized result as is, or discard it should the stabilization fail to generate a smooth output. Our system introduces two new modes of interaction that allow the user to improve the unsatisfactory stabilized video. First, we cluster tracks and visualize them on the warped video. The user ensures that appropriate tracks are selected by clicking on track clusters to include or exclude them. Second, the user can directly specify how regions in the output video should look by drawing quadrilaterals to select and deform parts of the frame. These user‐provided deformations reduce undesirable distortions in the video. Our algorithm then computes a stabilized video using the user‐selected tracks, while respecting the user‐modified regions. The process of interactively removing user‐identified artifacts can sometimes introduce new ones, though in most cases there is a net improvement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system with a variety of challenging hand held videos.     

Visibility Editing For All‐Frequency Shadow Design

We present an approach for editing shadows in all‐frequency lighting environments. To support artistic control, we propose to decouple shadowing from lighting and focus on providing intuitive controls to edit the former. To accomplish this task, we precompute and store scene visibility information separately from lighting and BRDFs and allow artists to edit visibility directly, by providing operations to select shadows and edit their shape. To facilitate a wider range of editing operations, we generalize visibility from binary to three‐channel oating point quantities and introduce a novel shadow representation based on computation of visibility ratios between the original render and the edited one. We demonstrate our results for diffuse and glossy surfaces, still scenes and animations.     

Scales and Scale‐like Structures

We present a method for generating scales and scale‐like structures on a polygonal mesh through surface replacement. As input, we require a triangular mesh that will be covered with scales and one or more proxy‐models to be used as the scale's shape. A user begins scale generation by drawing a lateral line on the model to control the distribution and orientation of scales on the surface. We then create a vector field over the surface to control an anisotropic Voronoi tessellation, which represents the region occupied by each scale. Next we replace these regions by cutting the proxy model to match the boundary of the Voronoi region and deform the cut model onto the surface. The result is a fully connected 2‐manifold that is suitable for subsequent post‐processing applications like surface subdivision.     

A Dynamic Noise Primitive for Coherent Stylization

We present a new solution for temporal coherence in non‐photorealistic rendering (NPR) of animations. Given the conflicting goals of preserving the 2D aspect of the style and the 3D scene motion, any such solution is a tradeoff. We observe that primitive‐based methods in NPR can be seen as texture‐based methods when using large numbers of primitives, leading to our key insight, namely that this process is similar to sparse convolution noise in procedural texturing. Consequently, we present a new primitive for NPR based on Gabor noise, that preserves the 2D aspect of noise, conveys the 3D motion of the scene, and is temporally continuous. We can thus use standard techniques from procedural texturing to create various styles, which we show for interactive NPR applications. We also present a user study to evaluate this and existing solutions, and to provide more insight in the trade‐off implied by temporal coherence. The results of the study indicate that maintaining coherent motion is important, but also that our new solution provides a good compromise between the 2D aspect of the style and 3D motion.     

A PCA Decomposition for Real‐time BRDF Editing and Relighting with Global Illumination

We propose a novel rendering method which supports interactive BRDF editing as well as relighting on a 3D scene. For interactive BRDF editing, we linearize an analytic BRDF model with basis BRDFs obtained from a principal component analysis. For each basis BRDF, the radiance transfer is precomputed and stored in vector form. In rendering time, illumination of a point is computed by multiplying the radiance transfer vectors of the basis BRDFs by the incoming radiance from gather samples and then linearly combining the results weighted by user‐controlled parameters. To improve the level of accuracy, a set of sub‐area samples associated with a gather sample refines the glossy reflection of the geometric details without increasing the precomputation time. We demonstrate this program with a number of examples to verify the real‐time performance of relighting and BRDF editing on 3D scenes with complex lighting and geometry.     

Modeling Complex Unfoliaged Trees from a Sparse Set of Images

We present a novel image‐based technique for modeling complex unfoliaged trees. Existing tree modeling tools either require capturing a large number of views for dense 3D reconstruction or rely on user inputs and botanic rules to synthesize natural‐looking tree geometry. In this paper, we focus on faithfully recovering real instead of realistically‐looking tree geometry from a sparse set of images. Our solution directly integrates 2D/3D tree topology as shape priors into the modeling process. For each input view, we first estimate a 2D skeleton graph from its matte image and then find a 2D skeleton tree from the graph by imposing tree topology. We develop a simple but effective technique for computing the optimal 3D skeleton tree most consistent with the 2D skeletons. For each edge in the 3D skeleton tree, we further apply volumetric reconstruction to recover its corresponding curved branch. Finally, we use piecewise cylinders to approximate each branch from the volumetric results. We demonstrate our framework on a variety of trees to illustrate the robustness and usefulness of our technique.