Making digital characters: creation, deformation, and animation

Digital characters have been taken an very important role for filmmaking and video games over the last decade. Now we are at the border that the difference between digital characters and real ones are vanishing. In this course we will introduce the fundamental knowledge of how to create digital characters. A state-of-the-art workflow consists of three stages: creating of the facial and body puppet, applying the right deformation techniques to the puppet, and driving the puppet with keyframe animation or motion capture data through retargeting. Our goal is to present the best practice guide in terms of making digital humans for visual production. We start with an general overview of the process on how to make digital characters. It then focuses on the details about production of facial and body puppets through 3D acquisition of geometry and texture, template registration techniques that are based on generic deformation or morphable models, using deformation transfer to automatically create believable poses, and how to use motion capture data to enhance the current poses. The second part of the course will introduce various important deformation techniques such as skinning, pose space deformation, and how to do volumetric deformation based on real body medical imaging data. Finally several animation techniques will be presented to show how to make puppets perform.