Customizing and Populating Animated Digital Mannequins for Real-Time Application

Abstract

Animated human body models are widely used in computer graphics applications. Creating such models requires extensive design efforts, specialized hardware such as body scanners, model databases and authoring tools. Customizing these characters or creating a virtual population with them requires multiple design efforts or powerful computers. In this paper we present a simple and robust method to create variously sized bodies based on a single template animated human body model. To achieve this, our method uses the skinning information attached to the model. By taking the positions of skeletal joints as a reference, our method automatically segments the body into its anatomical regions. Then, by using the anthropometric landmarks as parameters, the regions are deformed and the underlying skeletal structure is adapted to fit the new morphology. Our method preserves the skeleton-mesh integrity for variously sized bodies. We demonstrate our method by using a database of anthropometry measurements to generate a population of virtual humans generated from our single template model.