Animated feather coats using field lines

ABSTRACT

The tedious task of manually placing feathers on computer animated objects involves aligning feathers, ensuring that they do not insect each other or penetrate the surface, deforming every feather to match the local surface features, and ensuring that the feather coat is consistent when the underlying object is animated.

We present a technique for generating a feather coat over an object. Feather orientation is specified quickly and easily, feathers are deformed while ensuring collision prevention, and the coat can be animated. We create a vector field in the space surrounding the body object and deform feathers to align with the field lines. The non-intersection property of the field lines ensures that feather intersections are avoided. We provide a formulation of a suitable vector field and demonstrate that it is capable of producing realistic feather coats. The process can easily be integrated into the work-flow of standard modelling and animation processes.

We show examples of feather coat creation on a range of objects, proving that field line based placement of feather coats provides the desired functionality for feather modelling and animation.

REFERENCES

• 1: 3 DA, 2004. Framestore CFC: Harry Potter 3, http://www.3dyanimacion.com/entrevistas/entrevistas. cfm?link=framecf chp3eng01. {Last Accessed: 5 June 2006}.
• 2: Matt Aitken , Greg Butler , Dan Lemmon , Eric Saindon , Dana Peters , Guy Williams, The Lord of the Rings: the visual effects that brought middle earth to the screen, ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Course Notes, p.11-es, August 08-12, 2004, Los Angeles, CA [doi>10.1145/1103900.1103911]
• 3: Shaun Bangay , Chantelle Morkel, Graph matching with subdivision surfaces for texture synthesis on surfaces, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Computer graphics, virtual reality, visualisation and interaction in Africa, January 25-27, 2006, Cape Town, South Africa [doi>10.1145/1108590.1108601]
• 4: Yanyun Chen , Yingqing Xu , Baining Guo , Heung-Yeung Shum, Modeling and rendering of realistic feathers, Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, July 23-26, 2002, San Antonio, Texas
• 5: Cristiano G. Franco , Marcelo Walter, Modeling and Rendering of Individual Feathers, Proceedings of the 15th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing, p.293-299, October 07-10, 2002
• 6: Hadap, S., and Magnenat-Thalmann, N. 2001. Modeling dynamic hair as a continuum. Computer Graphics Forum 20, 3, 329--338.
• 7: Kaufman, D., 2002. Stuart little 2: Taking character animation to the next level or fur, feathers and flying. SIGGRAPH 2002 Course notes, http://www.imageworks.com/films/stuartlittle/pdf/StuartLittle2.pdf, {Last Accessed: 12 April 2005}.
• 8: Newport, M. 2005. Start to Finish Feathers Solution. Master's thesis, N.C.C.A Bournemouth University.
• 9: Robertson, B. 2001. Birds of a feather. Computer Graphics World (January), 22--27.
• 10: Lisa Marie Strett , Wolfgang Heidrich, Modelling of feather coat morphogenesis for computer graphics, The University of British Columbia (Canada), 2004
• 11: Greg Turk, Texture synthesis on surfaces, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.347-354, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383297]
• 12: Xiaoming Wei , Ye Zhao , Zhe Fan , Wei Li , Suzanne Yoakum-Stover , Arie Kaufman, Blowing in the wind, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, July 26-27, 2003, San Diego, California
• 13: Xiaoming Wei , Ye Zhao , Zhe Fan , Wei Li , Feng Qiu , Suzanne Yoakum-Stover , Arie E. Kaufman, Lattice-Based Flow Field Modeling, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.10 n.6, p.719-729, November 2004 [doi>10.1109/TVCG.2004.48]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.5 Computational Geometry and Object Modeling

Keywords:
animation, collision detection, feather coat, field line