Animation of People from Surface Motion Capture

Digital content production traditionally requires highly skilled artists and animators to first manually craft shape and appearance models and then instill the models with a believable performance. Motion capture technology is now increasingly used to record the articulated motion of a real human performance to increase the visual realism in animation. Motion capture is limited to recording only the skeletal motion of the human body and requires the use of specialist suits and markers to track articulated motion. In this paper we present surface capture, a fully automated system to capture shape and appearance as well as motion from multiple video cameras as a basis to create highly realistic animated content from an actor’s performance in full wardrobe. We address wide-baseline scene reconstruction to provide 360 degree appearance from just 8 camera views and introduce an efficient scene representation for level of detail control in streaming and rendering. Finally we demonstrate interactive animation control in a computer games scenario using a captured library of human animation, achieving a frame rate of 300fps on consumer level graphics hardware.