Automatic mesh animation preview

With growing number of high quality 3D models published online, the technique of generating efficient and economical 3D model previews has raised increasing concerns. Although several previous work has been done on the preview of static mesh, that of animated mesh is different and more complex due to the difficulty in describing the animation. In this paper, we present a novel method of automatic preview generation for 3D mesh animation. A new measure named inter-frame surface saliency, which evaluates both inter-frame motions and surface saliency in each frame, is introduced. Given an animated mesh, an energy function combining this measure and camera smoothness is constructed for the representative viewpoints selection in key frames, and then an optimal camera path is generated. Finally, a brief but informative preview could be created by moving the camera along this path with frame rate control.