Clothes & Hair: new advances towards the modeling of realistic virtual humans

Modeling convincing clothes and hair are essential for achieving realistic virtual humans. They are however among the most difficult features to achieve: Modeling garments is currently very tedious using standard software (the user has to specify 2D patterns, to position and assemble them in 3D around the character body, and then run a costly physically based simulation, even if only a rest shape is needed). Hair styling either uses purely geometric approaches which may lead to unrealistic results or costly simulations. This talk presents some recent advances on both problems.
We first introduce a system that models realistic worn garments (i.e. locally developable surfaces, with the adequate folds and wrinkles caused by wrapping around the human body) from a single contour sketched by the user above a mannequin model. We validate the results by comparing the generated virtual garement with real replica sewn from the 2D patterns we output. The second part of the talk covers hair modeling: we introduce a new Lagangian, reduced coordinates model called "Super-Helices", which is used to accurately discretize Cosserat's continuous model for elastic rods. We show that a static implementation of this model enables to achieve very realistic hair styles for arbitrary ethnical groups, and present the extension of the method to dynamic hair simulation.


Short bio:
Marie-Paule Cani is a Professor of Computer Science at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG), France. She graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and was awarded membership of the Institut Universitaire de France in 1999. She was paper co-chair of EUROGRPAHICS 2004, conference co-chair of IEEE Shape Modeling and Applications (SMI) 2005, and is paper co-chair of the ACM-EG Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) 2006.
Her main research interests cover physically-based simulation, implicit surfaces applied to interactive modelling and animation and the design of layered models incorporating alternative representations and LODs. Recent applications include pattern-based texturing, the animation of natural phenomena such as lava-flows, ocean, vegetation and human hair, real-time virtual surgery and interactive modeling techniques based on sculpting and sketching systems.