Animation transplantation

We present a novel method to animate a static geometry by cloning a captured animation sequence. More precisely, given a sequence of range scans of a deforming object which has been captured by a real-time 3D scanner, we describe a novel algorithm to clone the animation of the recorded geometry onto another triangle mesh. To achieve this, we reconstruct a coherent animated mesh of the input sequence using a template deformation approach. Then we employ a new algorithm for robust marker-less non-rigid registration to deform one frame of the generated animation such that it matches a different 3D model. The resulting registration is further used to find correspondences between the animation and the target object which are in turn used to transfer the animation of the recorded sequence onto the target shape. Transferring the entire geometry of the animations results in very convincing facial expressions since even the smallest expression wrinkles are preserved. We evaluate the robustness and the performance of the proposed algorithms using a variety of data sets, including facial animations and whole body animations. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. We propose new method for animation reconstruction from real-time 3D scanner data and a simple non-rigid registration technique based purely on geometric features. We then use the deformable registration to clone the reconstructed animation sequences onto a static triangle mesh, yielding realistic results for facial and whole-body animations.