Skip to main content
Log in

Automatic modeling of virtual humans and body clothing

  • Published:
Journal of Computer Science and Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Highly realistic virtual human models are rapidly becoming commonplace in computer graphics. These models, often represented by complex shape and requiring labor-intensive process, challenge the problem of automatic modeling. The problem and solutions to automatic modeling of animatable virtual humans are studied. Methods for capturing the shape of real people, parameterization techniques for modeling static shape (the variety of human body shapes) and dynamic shape (how the body shape changes as it moves) of virtual humans are classified, summarized and compared. Finally, methods for clothed virtual humans are reviewed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Scheepers F, Parent R E, Carlson W E, May S F. Anatomy-based modeling of the human musculature. InProc. SIGGRAPH'97, los Angeles, CA, USA, 1997, pp.163–172.

  2. Shen J, Thalmann D. Interactive shape design using metaballs and splines. InProc. Implicit Surfaces'95, Grenoble, France, 1995, pp.187–196.

  3. Wilhelms J, Van Gelder A. Anatomically based modeling. InProc. SIGGRAPH'97, Los Angeles, CA, USA 1997, pp.173–180.

  4. Devernay F, Faugeras O D. Computing differential properties of 3-D shapes from stereoscopic images without 3-D models. InProc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Seattle, WA, USA, 1994, pp.208–213.

  5. NASA Reference Publication 1024. The Anthropometry Source Book, Volumes I and II.

  6. Cordier F, Magnenat-Thalmann N. Real-time animation of dressed virtual humans.Computer Graphics Forum, Blackwell Publishers, 2002, 21(3): 327–336.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Fua P. Human modeling from video sequence.Geomatics Info Magazine, July 1999, 13(7): 63–65.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lee W, Gu J, Magnenat-Thalmann N. Generating animatable 3D virtual humans from photographs. InProc. Eurographics'2000, Interlaken, Switzerland, 2000,Computer Graphics Forum, 19(3): 1–10.

  9. Hilton A, Beresford D, Gentils T, Smith R, Sun W. Virtual people: Capturing human models to populate virtual worlds. InProc. Computer Animation, Geneva, Switzerland, IEEE Press, 1999, pp.174–185.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Daanen H A M, Van de Water G J. Whole body scanners.Elsevier Displays, 1998, 19(3): 111–120.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Dekker L. 3D human body modeling from range data [Dissertation]. University College London, 2000.

  12. Ju X, Siebert J P. Conforming generic animatable models to 3D scanned data. InProc. 6th Numerisation 3D/Scanning 2001 Congress, Paris, France, 2001.

  13. Allen B, Curless B, Popovic Z. Articulated body deformation from range scan data. InProc. SIGGRAPH'02, San Antonio, TX, USA, Addison-Wesley, 2002, pp.612–619.

  14. Seo H, Magnenat-Thalmann N. An automatic modelling of human bodies from sizing parameters. InProc. ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, Monterey, CA, USA, 2003, pp.19–26, p.234.

  15. Kakadiaris I A, Metaxas D. 3D human body model acquisition from multiple views. InProc. the Fifth International Conference on Computer Vision, Boston, MA, USA, June 20–23, 1995, pp.618–623.

  16. Plaenkers R, Fua P, D'Apuzzo N. Automated body modeling from video sequences. InProc. IEEE-ICCV Workshop on Modeling People, Corfu, Greece, 1999, pp.45–52.

  17. Dooley M. Anthropometric modeling programs — A survey.IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 1982, 2(9): 17–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Azuola F, Badler N I, Ho Pet al. Building anthropometry-based virtual human models. InProc. IMAGE VII Conf., Tuscon. AZ, June, 1994.

  19. NASA Man-Systems Integration Manual (NASA-STD-3000).

  20. Seo H, Yahia-Cherif L, Goto T, Magnenat-Thalmann N. GENESIS: Generation of E-population based on statistical information. InProc. Computer Animation, Geneva, Switzerland, 2002, pp.81–85.

  21. DeCarlo D, Metaxas D, Stone M. An anthropometric face model using variational techniques. InProc. SIGGRAPH'98, Orlando, FL, USA, Addison-Wesley, 1998, pp. 67–74.

  22. Rose C, Cohen M, Bodenheimer B. Verbs and adverbs: Multidimensional motion interpolation using RBF.IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 1998, 18(5): 32–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Sloan P P, Rose C, Cohen M. Shape by example.ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, NC, USA, 2001, pp.135–143.

  24. Blanz B, Vetter T. A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces. InProc. SIGGRAPH'99, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Addison-Wesley, 1999, pp.187–194.

  25. Seo H, Cordier F, Magnenat-Thalmann N. Synthesizing animatable body models with parameterized shape modifications. InProc. ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, San Diego, CA, USA, 2003, pp.120–125

  26. Allen B, Curless B, Popovic Z. The space of all body shapes: Reconstruction and parameterization from range scans. InProc. SIGGRAPH'03, San Diego, CA, USA, Addison-Wesley, 2003, pp.587–594.

  27. Magnenat-Thalmann N, Laperrière R, Daniel Thalmann. Joint-dependent local deformations for hand animation and object grasping. InProc. Graphics Interface, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 1988, pp.26–33.

  28. Lewis J P, Cordner M, Fong N. Pose space deformations: A unified approach to shape interpolation and skeleton-driven deformation. InProc. SIGGRAPH'00, New Orleans, LA, USA, 2000, pp.165–172.

  29. Kry P G, James D L, Pai D K. Eigen Skin: Real time large deformation character skinning in graphics hardware.ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation, San Antonio, TX, USA, 2002, pp.153–159.

  30. Mohr A, Gleicher M. Building efficient, accurate character skins from examples. InProc. SIGGRAPH'03, San Diego, CA, USA, Addison-Wesley, 2003, pp.165–172.

  31. Bhat K, Twigg C, Hodgins Jet al. Estimating cloth simulation parameters from video. InProc. ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, San Diego, CA, USA, 2003, pp.37–51.

  32. Furakawa T, Gu J, Lee W-S,Magnenat-Thalmann N. 3D clothes modeling from photo cloned human body. InProc. Virtual Worlds'2000, Paris, France, 2000, pp.159–170.

  33. Cordier F, Seo H, Magnenat-Thalmann N. Made-to-measure technologies for online clothing store.IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Special Issue on Web Graphics, Jan/Feb 2003, 23(1): 38–48.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Volino P, Magnenat-Thalmann N. Comparing efficiency of integration methods for cloth animation. InProc. Computer Graphics International'01, Hong-Kong, China, 2001, pp.265–274.

  35. Choi K-J, Ko H-S. Stable but responsive cloth. InProc. SIGGRAPH'02, San Antonio, TX, USA, 2002, pp.604–611.

  36. Eberhardt B, Weber A, Strasser W. A fast flexible particle-system model for cloth draping.IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Sept. 1996, 16(5): 52–59.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Baraff D, Witkin A, Kass M. Untangling cloth. InProc. SIGGRAPH'03, San Diego, CA, USA, 2003, pp.862–870.

  38. Baraff D, Witkin A. Large steps in cloth simulation. InProc. SIGGRAPH'98, Orlando, FL, USA, Addison Wesley, 1998, pp.43–54.

  39. Meyer M, Debunne G, Desbrun M, Barr A H. Interactive animation of cloth-like objects in virtual reality.Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, John Wiley & Sons, 2000, 12(1): 1–12.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Desbrun M, Schröder P, Barr A H. Interactive animation of structured deformable objects. InProc. Graphics Interface'99, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 1999, pp.1–8.

  41. Vassilev T, Spanlang B. Fast cloth animation on walking avatars.Eurographics, Blackwell Publishers, 2001, 20(3): 137–150.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Grzeszczuk R, Terzopoulos D, Hinto G. Neuroanimator: Fast neural network emulation and control of physics-based models. InProc. SIGGRAPH'98, Orlando, FL, USA Addison Wesley, 1998, pp.9–20.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann.

Additional information

Survey

This research is supported by the Swiss National Research Foundation (FNRS).

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann has researched virtual humans for more than 20 years. She studied psychology, biology, and chemistry at the University of Geneva and obtained her Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1977. In 1989 she founded MIRALab, an interdisciplinary creative research laboratory at the University of Geneva. Some recent awards for her work include the 1992 Moebius Prize for the best multimedia system awarded by the European Community, “Best Paper” at the British Computer Graphics Society congress in 1993, to the Brussels Film Academy for her work in virtual worlds in 1993, and election to the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences in 1997. She has published several books and more than 300 papers, and is editor of several scientific journals, among which she is Editor-in-Chief of the Visual Computer published by Springer Verlag and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds published by John Wiley. She can be contacted at thalmann@miralab.unige.ch.

Hyewon Seo recently obtained her Ph.D. degree in computer science at the MIRALab, University of Geneva, Switzerland. She was awarded a Swiss Federal Scholarship for Foreign Students from 1998 to 1999. She obtained her B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Taejon, Korea, in 1996 and 1998, respectively. Her current research interests are in the areas of modeling and deformation of graphical objects, biology-inspired visual computing, and digital human modeling for human centered design. She is a member of ACM and Eurographics.

Frederic Cordier recently received his Ph.D. degree in computer science at the MIRALab, University of Geneva, where he works on real-time skin and cloth deformation for simulating dressed virtual humans. Before joining the MIRALab, he studied at the University Lyon-I in Lyon, France, and received his Master's degree in computer graphics in 1997. Since 1998, he has published over 17 papers in the field of medical imaging, skin deformation, and real-time cloth simulation. His current research interests include collision detection, physically-based techniques for digital human modeling, and sketch-based interfaces.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Seo, H. & Cordier, F. Automatic modeling of virtual humans and body clothing. J. Comput. Sci. & Technol. 19, 575–584 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02945583

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02945583

Keywords

Navigation