Surface Capture for Performance-Based Animation

Creating realistic animated models of people is a central task in digital content production. Traditionally, highly skilled artists and animators construct shape and appearance models for digital character. They then define the character´s motion at each time frame or specific key-frames in a motion sequence to create a digital performance. Increasingly, producers are using motion capture technology to record animations from an actor´s performance. This technology reduces animation production time and captures natural movements to create a more believable production. However, motion capture requires the use of specialist suits and markers and only records skeletal motion. It lacks the detailed secondary surface dynamics of cloth and hair that provide the visual realism of a live performance. Over the last decade, we have investigated studio capture technology with the objective of creating models of real people that accurately reflect the time-varying shape and appearance of the whole body with clothing. Surface capture is a fully automated system for capturing a human´s shape and appearance as well as motion from multiple video cameras to create highly realistic animated content from an actor´s performance in full wardrobe. Our system solves two key problems in performance capture: scene capture from a limited number of camera views and efficient scene representation for visualization