Abstract
The realistic animation of real-world trees is a challenging task because natural trees have various morphology and internal dynamic properties. In this paper, we present an approach to model and animate a specific tree by capturing the motion of its branches. We chose Kinect V2 to record both the RGB and depth of motion of branches with markers. To obtain the three-dimensional (3D) trajectory of branches, we used the mean-shift algorithm to track the markers from color images generated by projecting a textured point cloud onto the image plane, and then inversely mapped the tracking results in the image to 3D coordinates. Next, we performed a fast Fourier transform on the tracked 3D positions to estimate the dynamic properties (i.e., the natural frequency) of the branches. We constructed static tree models using a space colonization algorithm. Given the dynamic properties and static tree models, we demonstrated that our approach can produce realistic animation of trees in wind fields.
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Acknowledgment
We thank Dr. Maxine Garcia and Shujie Deng for editing the English text of a draft of this manuscript. The work is supported by the NSFC (61303124) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Z109021708).
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Hu, S., He, P., He, D. (2017). Motion Capture and Estimation of Dynamic Properties for Realistic Tree Animation. In: Chang, J., Zhang, J., Magnenat Thalmann, N., Hu, SM., Tong, R., Wang, W. (eds) Next Generation Computer Animation Techniques. AniNex 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10582. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69487-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69487-0_2
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