Reading the papers, it occurred to me that maybe animators today subconsciously limit their imagination because of present day tools. While there are mind numbing breakthroughs in every movie, I think that just as if you limited an artist to charcoal he wouldn't think in color, similarly an animator would have a limited mindset. That's why it would still be exciting to see animation 10 years from now, when a new generation of animators have grown up on a new wave of production technology.
Here's the list. It is a fairly broad variety:
Cloth
Stitch Meshes for Modeling Knitted Clothing with Yarn-level Detail
Identified the basic stitch types and how they fundamentally are stitched together, then reduces each stitch quantum to a cell. A lot of details about real-life knitting informs their modeling, although the computer can produce good looking but physically impossible stitches. To generate the model, there's an interactive UI where the user inputs info on the stitch patterns. The whole cloth model (e.g. a sweater) is sectioned into clickable faces for individual modification. Now, the mesh faces are relaxed, which is to curve around the body wearing it realistically, and the cells are constructed on each face, relaxing with them. To complete this, there is then the yarn-level relaxation, which makes each knit stand out like a real sweater. The relaxation converges around the wearer until the rate of change hits a threshold.
Comics, Texture and Scribbles
Digital Reconstruction of Half-toned Color Comics
Digitizes paper-printed comics by using algorithms to separate black ink from the colors which are screened dots in CMY. The black lines must be unscreened and are recovered as a binary file. Grids are used to approximate the dots. These elements are then vectorized as parametric models and quite slowly rendered in a highly compressed file. Because the black lines are separated and sharp, the comic panel can easily be layered for parallax viewing.
- Their method:
- Estimate the primaries for the Neugebauer trilinear model and compute a CMY color separation by inverting the Neugebauer equation.
- Detect the dot grid for each of the CMY channels.
- Use optimization to jointly recover a binary black ink mask and the individual dot shapes.
- Vectorize the black ink mask and filter the color channels.
> (paper not avail yet)
Lighting Hair From The Inside: A Thermal Approach to Hair Reconstruction
Skinning
Elasticity-Inspired Deformers for Character Articulation
Control Deformables
Deformable Objects Alive!
Uses rest poses to direct object motion. Deformable objects are actively and autonomously animated. It's not the usual passive case where something like jelly would be constrained to flop through a crack in a certain way, but in which the jelly would hop and jump.
Fast Simulation of Skeleton-driven Deformable Body Characters
Sketching
Three-dimensional Proxies for Hand-drawn Characters
Noise and Texture
Structure-aware Synthesis for Predictive Woven Fabric Appearance
Particles
Ghost SPH for Animating Water
Versatile Rigid-fluid Coupling for Incompressile SPH
Found a nice intro to SPH. I'll probably have to read a lot more simulation papers, not just SPH, to understand the significance, and the 'this' in general. Actually, this applies for all the papers. For Ghost SPH, you basically have namesake particles which are invisibly applying thousands of little springs to the real water particles to keep them in a certain form.
Collisions
Efficient Geometrically Exact Continuous Collision Detection
Mathematics and Physics of Light
Physically-based Simulation of Rainbows
All about images
What Makes Paris Look like Paris?
Mesh Based Fluids
Langrangian Vortex Sheets for Animating Fluids
Discrete Viscous Sheets
-- Discrete Viscous Threads (2010)
