Recent advances in dynamic surface capture have made the creation of a realistic animation a promising task for modern visual media production such as computer generated movies or 3D cinematographic video games. Nonetheless, automatic creation of cartoon mesh animations, driven by real-life cues, is still a costly and time-consuming process and presents a number of hard technical challenges. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first attempt at generating as-photorealistic-as possible cartoon animation from markerless surface performance capture. The purpose of synthesizing new puppetry animation demonstrating fidelity to the spirit of comic book style with more exaggerated motion while preserving extreme captured cloth wrinkles is difficult to achieve. Consequently, the key contribution of our work focuses on a novel cartoon stylization approach for 3D video that efficiently reuse temporally consistent dynamic surface sequence captured from real-world actor performance. In particular, our simple and effective algorithm converts realistic spatiotemporal captured surfaces and multi-view data into an exaggerated life-like squash-and-stretch shape evolution coupled with context-aware cartoon-style expressive rendering.

Video-Based Toon Character from Surface Performance Capture
Yann Savoye
SIGGRAPH ASIA '11: ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2011 Technical Sketches, Hong Kong,
China. December 13-15, 2011 (acceptance rate: 22.6%) - Lead Session Sketch

@inproceedings{Savoye2011perftoon,
author = {Savoye, Yann},
title = {Video-based toon character from surface performance capture},
booktitle = {SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Sketches},
series = {SA '11},
year = {2011},
isbn = {978-1-4503-1138-0},
location = {Hong Kong, China},
pages = {9:1--9:2},
articleno = {9},
numpages = {2},
acmid = {2077390},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

dynamic surface capture, visual media production, performance capture stylization, cage-based deformation, cartoon mesh, cartoon stylization for 3D video, exaggerated life-like squash-and-stretch shape evolution, cartoon-style expressive rendering