Clothes & Hair: new advances towards the modeling of realistic virtual humans

Speaker:	Professor Marie-Paule Cani
		GRAVIR lab, INRIA & INP Grenoble
		France

Title:		"Clothes & Hair: new advances towards the modeling of
		 realistic virtual humans"

Date:		Monday, 29 January 2007

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theater F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lift nos. 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

Modeling convincing clothes and hair is essential for achieving realistic
virtual humans. They are however among the most difficult features to
achieve: Modeling garments is currently very tedious using standard
software (the user has to specify 2D patterns, to position and assemble
them in 3D around the character body, and then run a costly
physically-based simulation, even if only a rest shape is needed). Hair
styling either use user-intensive, purely geometric approaches or combine
geometric features - such as drawing wavy or curly hair strands - with
some simplified physically-based model. This talk presents some recent
advances on both problems.

We first introduce a system that models realistic worn garments (i.e.
locally developable surfaces, with the adequate folds and wrinkles caused
by wrapping around the human body) from a single contour sketched by the
user above a mannequin model. We validate the results by comparing the
generated virtual garement with real replica sewn from the 2D patterns we
output.

The second part of the talk covers hair modeling: we introduce a new
Lagangian, reduced coordinates model called "Super-Helices", which is used
to accurately discretize Cosserat's continuous model for elastic rods. We
show that a static implementation of this model enables to predict very
realistic styles for hair from arbitrary ethnical groups, and present the
extension of the method to dynamic hair simulation.


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Biography:

Marie-Paule Cani is a Professor of Computer Science at the Institut
National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG), France. She graduated from the
Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and was awarded membership of the
Institut Universitaire de France in 1999. She was paper co-chair of
EUROGRPAHICS 2004, conference co-chair of IEEE Shape Modeling and
Applications (SMI) 2005, and paper co-chair of the ACM-EG Symposium on
Computer Animation (SCA) 2006.Her main research interests cover
physically-based simulation, implicit surfaces applied to interactive
modelling and animation and the design of layered models incorporating
alternative representations and LODs. Recent applications include the
animation of natural phenomena such as lava-flows, ocean, vegetation and
human hair, real-time virtual surgery and interactive modeling techniques
based on sculpting and sketching systems.