A Two-Step Approach for Interactive Animatable Avatars

Takumi Kitamura, Naoya Iwamoto, Hiroshi Kawasaki, Diego Thomas

Abstract: We propose a two-step human body animation technique that generates pose-dependent detailed deformations in real-time on standard animation pipeline. In order to accomplish real-time animation, we utilize the template-based approach and represent pose-dependent deformations using 2D displacement maps. In order to generalize to totally new motions, we employ a two-step strategy: 1) the first step aligns the topology of the Skinned Multi-Person Linear Model (SMPL) [25] model to our proposed template model. 2) the second step models detailed clothes and muscles deformation for the specific motion. Our experimental results show that our proposed method can animate an avatar up to 30 times faster than baselines while keeping similar or even better level of details.