Data-driven 2D effects animation

Abstract

Making plausible, high quality visual effects, like water splashes or fire, in traditional 2D animation pipelines require an animator to draw many frames of phenomena that are very difficult to recreate manually. We present a technique that uses a database of video clips of such phenomena to assist the animator. The animator has to only input sample sketched frames of the phenomena at particular time instants. These are matched to frames of the video clips and a plausible sequence of frames is generated from these clips that contain the animator drawn frames as constraints. The colour style of the hand-drawn frames is used to render the generated frames, thus resulting in a 2D animation that follows the style and intent of the 2D animator. Our system can also create multi-layered effects animation, allowing the animator to draw interacting mixed phenomena, like water being poured on fire.