Automatically Generate Rigged Character from Single Image

Abstract

Animation plays an important role in virtual reality and augmented reality applications. However, it requires great efforts for non-professional users to create animation assets. In this paper, we propose a systematic pipeline to generate ready-to-used characters from images for real-time animation without user intervention. Rather than per-pixel mapping or synthesis in image space using optical flow or generative models, we employ an approximate geometric embodiment to undertake 3D animation without large distortion. The geometry structure is generated from a type-agnostic character. A skeleton adaption is then adopted to guarantee semantic motion transfer to the geometry proxy. The generated character is compatible with standard 3D graphics engines and ready to use for real-time applications. Experiments show that our method works on various images (e.g. sketches, cartoons, and photos) of most object categories (e.g. human, animals, and non-creatures). We develop an AR demo to show its potential usage for fast prototyping.