Kwang-Jin Choi

Stable but responsive cloth

We present a semi-implicit cloth simulation technique that is very stable yet also responsive. The stability of the technique allows the use of a large fixed time step when simulating all types of fabrics and character motions. The animations generated using this technique are strikingly realistic. Wrinkles form and disappear in a quite natural way, which is the feature that most distinguishes textile fabrics from other sheet materials. Significant improvements in both the stability and realism were made possible by overcoming the post-buckling instability as well as the numerical instability. The instability caused by buckling arises from a structural instability and therefore cannot be avoided by simply employing a semi-implicit method. Addition of a damping force may help to avoid instabilities; however, it can significantly degrade the realism of the cloth motion. The method presented here uses a particle-based physical model to handle the instability in the post-buckling response without introducing any fictitious damping.We present a semi-implicit cloth simulation technique that is very stable yet also responsive. The stability of the technique allows the use of a large fixed time step when simulating all types of fabrics and character motions. The animations generated using this technique are strikingly realistic. Wrinkles form and disappear in a quite natural way, which is the feature that most distinguishes textile fabrics from other sheet materials. Significant improvements in both the stability and realism were made possible by overcoming the post-buckling instability as well as the numerical instability. The instability caused by buckling arises from a structural instability and therefore cannot be avoided by simply employing a semi-implicit method. Addition of a damping force may help to avoid instabilities; however, it can significantly degrade the realism of the cloth motion. The method presented here uses a particle-based physical model to handle the instability in the post-buckling response without introducing any fictitious damping.

Research problems in clothing simulation

Clothing simulation and animation are of great importance in computer animation. If cloth simulations could be improved to the point that they could generate realistic cloth motion in real-time, they would find uses in many aspects of daily life such as in fashion design and manufacturing. The area of cloth simulation and animation is full of technical challenges: creating more realistic results, achieving faster run-times, and developing methods capable of constructing and simulating more complex garments. This paper provides an overview of the key procedures involved in the creation of clothed characters, describes the current state-of-the-art techniques, and proposes the research problems that most require further study. Three technical aspects of cloth simulation are considered in this paper: garment construction, physically based simulation, and collision resolution.

Online motion retargetting

This paper presents a method to retarget the motion of a character to another in real time. The technique is based on inverse rate control, which computes the changes in joint angles corresponding to the changes in end-effector position. While tracking the multiple end-effector trajectories of the original subject or character, our online motion retargetting also minimizes the joint angle differences by exploiting the kinematic redundancies of the animated model. This method can apply a captured motion to another anthropometry so that it can perform slightly different motion, while preserving the original motion characteristics. Because the above is done online, a real-time performance can be mapped to other characters. Moreover, if the method is used interactively during motion capture session, the feedback of retargetted motion on the screen provides more chances to get satisfactory results. As a by-product, our algorithm can be used to reduce measurement errors in restoring captured motion. The data enhancement improves the accuracy in both joint angles and end-effector positions. Experimental results show that our retargetting algorithm preserves high-frequency details of the original motion quite accurately. Copyright

On-line motion retargetting

This paper presents a method to retarget the motion of a character to another in real-time. The technique is based on inverse rate control, which compares the changes in joint angles corresponding to the changes in end-effector position. While tracking the multiple end-effector trajectories of the original subject or character, our on-line motion retargetting also minimizes the joint angle differences by exploiting the kinematic redundancies of the animated model. This method can generalize a captured motion for another anthropometry to perform slightly different motion, while preserving the original motion characteristics. Because the above is done in on-line, a real-time performance can be mapped to other characters. Moreover, if the method is used interactively during motion capture session, the feedback of retargetted motion on the screen provides more chances to get satisfactory results. As a by-product, our algorithm can be used to reduce measurement errors in restoring captured motion. The data enhancement improves the accuracy in both joint angles and end-effector positions. Experiments prove that our retargetting algorithm preserves the high frequency details of the original motion quite accurately.

Extending the Immediate Buckling Model to Triangular Meshes for Simulating Complex Clothes

The immediate buckling model is an essential element for simulating realistic cloth animations without introducing buckling instability. The original model is restricted to structured regular quad meshes, by which its use is severely limited. This paper extends the immediate buckling model from its original formulation in terms of regular quad meshes to irregular triangular meshes, thereby significantly increasing the applicability of the technique. Using a model that included cloth-specific buckling and anisotropy, we produced realistic animations of quite complex clothes.

Processing motion capture data to achieve positional accuracy

Abstract In animating an articulated entity with motion capture data, if the reconstruction is based on forward kinematics, there could be a large error in the end-effector position. The inaccuracy becomes conspicuous when the entity makes interactions with the environment or other entities. The frames at which the end-effector position needs to be accurate are designated as “keyframes” (e.g., the impact moment in a punch). We present an algorithm that processes the original joint angle data to produce a new motion in which the end-effector error is reduced to zero at keyframes. The new motion should not be too much different from the original motion. We formulated the problem as a constrained minimization problem so that the characteristics of the original joint angle data is optimally preserved during the enhancement steps. The algorithm was applied to several examples such as boxing, kicking, and catching motions. Experiments prove that our algorithm is a valuable tool to improve captured motion especially when the end-effector trajectory contains a special goal.

Constrainable Multigrid for Cloth

We present a new technique which can handle both point and sliding constraints in the multigrid (MG) framework. Although the MG method can theoretically perform as fast as O(N), the development of a clothing simulator based on the MG method calls for solving an important technical challenge: handling the constraints. Resolving constrains has been difficult in MG because there has been no clear way to transfer the constraints existing in the finest level mesh to the coarser level meshes. This paper presents a new formulation based on soft constraints, which can coarsen the constraints defined in the finest level to the coarser levels. Experiments are performed which show that the proposed method can solve the linear system up to 4–9 times faster in comparison with the modified preconditioned conjugate gradient method (MPCG) without quality degradation. The proposed method is easy to implement and can be straightforwardly applied to existing clothing simulators which are based on implicit time integration.