Spotted: Three-dimensional proxies for hand-drawn characters

Jessica Hodgins is a leader in animation and this work looks like it makes interesting connections between traditional 2d and new 3d methods. 

ACM TOG
Eakta Jain, Yaser Sheikh, Moshe Mahler, Jessica Hodgins

Drawing shapes by hand and manipulating computer-generated objects are the two dominant forms of animation. Though each medium has its own advantages, the techniques developed for one medium are not easily leveraged in the other medium because hand animation is two-dimensional, and inferring the third dimension is mathematically ambiguous. A second challenge is that the character is a consistent three-dimensional (3D) object in computer animation while hand animators introduce geometric inconsistencies in the two-dimensional (2D) shapes to better convey a character's emotional state and personality. In this work, we identify 3D proxies to connect hand-drawn animation and 3D computer animation. We present an integrated approach to generate three levels of 3D proxies: single-points, polygonal shapes, and a full joint hierarchy.

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