Concept

Twelve basic principles of animation

Related publications (24)

Computer Animation and Social Agents: 38th International Conference, CASA 2025, Strasbourg, France, June 2–4, 2025, Proceedings

The LNCS 15915 constitutes the proceedings from the 38th International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents, CASA 2025, held in Strasbourg, France, during June 2–4, 2025. The 20 papers (17 from the main conference and 3 from the AniNex workshop) presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. These papers focus on various aspects of Computer Animation and Social Agents, such as Motion Capture & Retargeting, Physics-based Animation, Vision-based Techniques, Behavioral Animat

Springer Nature Singapore2026

Simulation of nonverbal social interaction and small groups dynamics in virtual environments

Anthony Guye-Vuillème

How can the behaviour of humans who interact with other humans be simulated in virtual environments? This thesis investigates the issue by proposing a number of dedicated models, computer languages, software architectures, and specifications of computational components. It relies on a large knowledge base from the social sciences, which offers concepts, descriptions, and classifications that guided the research process. The simulation of nonverbal social interaction and group dynamics in virtual environment

EPFL2004

Style-based Motion Synthesis

Daniel Thalmann, Pascal Fua, Ronan Boulic

Representing motions as linear sums of principal components has become a widely accepted animation technique. While powerful, the simplest version of this approach is not particularly well suited to modeling the specific style of an individual whose motion had not yet been recorded when building the database: it would take an expert to adjust the PCA weights to obtain a motion style that is indistinguishable from his. Consequently, when realism is required, the current practice is to perform a full motion c

Wiley-Blackwell2004

Mahalanobis Motion Generation

Pascal Fua

Representing motions as linear sums of principal components has become a widely accepted animation technique. While powerful, the simplest version of this approach is not particularly well suited to modeling the specific style of an individual whose motion had not yet been recorded when building the database: It would take an expert to adjust the PCA weights to obtain a motion style that is indistinguishable from his. Consequently, when realism is required, current practice is to perform a full motion captu

2004

Implicit Meshes for Surface Reconstruction

Pascal Fua, Slobodan Ilic

Deformable 3--D models are used extensively in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision for Visualization, Animation and Modeling. They can be represented either as traditional explicit surfaces, such as triangulated meshes, or as implicit surfaces. Explicit surface representations are widely accepted because they are simple to deform and render. However, for fitting purposes, they suffer from the fact that using them typically involves minimizing a non-differentiable distance function. By contrast, implicit s

2004

Avatar Markup Language

Daniel Thalmann, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

Synchronization of speech, facial expressions and body gestures is one of the most critical problems in realistic avatar animation in virtual environments. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a new high-level animation language to describe avatar animation. The Avatar Markup Language (AML), based on XML, encapsulates the Text to Speech, Facial Animation and Body Animation in a unified manner with appropriate synchronization. We use low-level animation parameters, defined by the MPEG-4 standa

ACM2002

An informed environment for inhabited city simulation

Nathalie Germaine Thérèse Farenc

In combination with the rapid technical improvements of computers, building large virtual scenes has become a popular field in computer graphics for education, films or games. Often, virtual humans populate scenes such as real reconstructed city, disappeared building or virtual town, and they are expected to provide a real life feeling. The specific aim of this thesis is to perform action planning in order to populate these scenes with virtual humans. To achieve this goal, we use a database dedicated to urb

EPFL2001

Human shoulder modeling including scapulo-thoracic constraint and joint sinus cones

Daniel Thalmann

In virtual human modeling, the shoulder is usually composed of clavicular, scapular and arm segments related by rotational joints. Although the model is improved, the realistic animation of the shoulder is hardly achieved. This is due to the fact that it is difficult to coordinate the simultaneous motion of the shoulder components in a consistent way. Also, the common use of independent one-degree of freedom (DOF) joint hierarchies does not properly render the 3-D accessibility space of real joints. On the

Elsevier2000

Real-time animation and motion capture in Web Human Director (WHD)

Daniel Thalmann, Christian Babski

Motion capture systems usually work in conjunction with complex 3D applications, such as 3D Studio Max by Kinetix or Maya by Alias/Wavefront. Once models have been created in these applications, motion capture systems provide the necessary data input to animate these models. The context of this paper introduces a simple motion capture system, which is integrated into a Web-based application, thus allowing HANIM humanoids to be animated using VRML and Java. Since Web browser/VRML plugin context is commonly a

ACM2000

3D modeling of the human upper limb including the biomechanics of joints, muscles and soft tissues

The challenge in virtual human modeling is to achieve the representation of the main human characteristics with as much realism as possible. Such achievements would allow the simulation and/or analysis of many virtual situations involving humans. Simulation is especially useful to derive information from the models so as to predict and/or reproduce the behaviors that would be observed in real situations. Computer methods in visualization and simulation have thus great potential for advances in medicine. The

EPFL1999

Human motion capture driven by orientation measurements

Daniel Thalmann, Ronan Boulic

Motion capture techniques are rarely based on orientation measurements for two main reasons: (1) optical motion capture systems are designed for tracking object position rather than their orientation (which can be deduced from several trackers), (2) known animation techniques, like inverse kinematics or geometric algorithms, require position targets constantly, but orientation inputs only occasionally. We propose a complete human motion capture technique based essentially on orientation measurements. The po

MIT Press1999

Anyone for tennis?

Daniel Thalmann, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Amaury Aubel

The authors present a virtual tennis game. They describe the creation and modeling of the virtual humans and body deformations, also showing the real-time animation and rendering aspects of the avatars. They focus on the animation of the virtual tennis ball and the behavior of a synthetic, autonomous referee who judges the tennis games. The networked, collaborative, virtual environment system is described with special reference to its interfaces to driver programs. They also mention the virtual reality (VR)

MIT Press1999

Space discretization for efficient human navigation

Daniel Thalmann

There is a large body of research on motion control of legs in human models. However, they require specification of global paths in which to move. A method for automatically computing a global motion path for a human in a 3D environment of obstacles is presented. Object space is discretized into a 3D grid of uniform cells and an optimal path is generated between two points as a discrete cell path. The grid is treated as graph with orthogonal links of uniform cost. The A* search method is applied for path fi

1998

Real-time animation of realistic virtual humans

Daniel Thalmann, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Amaury Aubel

The authors have been working on simulating virtual humans for several years. Until recently, these constructs could not act in real time. Today, however, many applications need to simulate in real time virtual humans that look realistic. They have invested considerable effort in developing and integrating several modules into a system capable of animating humans in real-time situations. This includes interactive modules for building realistic individuals and a texture-fitting method suitable for all parts

IEEE1998

Integration of motion control techniques for virtual human and avatar real-time animation

Daniel Thalmann, Ronan Boulic, Luc Emering

Real-time animation of virtual humans requires a dedicated architecture for the integration of different motion control techniques running into so-called actions. In this paper, we describe a software architecture called AGENTlib for the management of action combination. Considered actions exploit various techniques from keyframe sequence playback to inverse kinematics and motion capture. Two major requirements have to be enforced from the end user viewpoint: first, that multiple motion controllers can cont

1997

Virtual hand interactions with 3D world

Daniel Thalmann, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

Interactions between a virtual actor and its virtual environment involve many aspects. An important one is hand interactions. In a virtual scene depicting everyday life, the actor will need to grasp and hold objects, in such a way that both skeleton motion and body deformation have a realistic visual aspect. It will also need to interact with other virtual actors sharing the same virtual world, shaking hands when meeting for example. The authors present an efficient and realistic method combining automatic

World Scientific1997

The HUMANOID environment for interactive animation of multiple deformable human characters

Daniel Thalmann, Ronan Boulic, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

We describe the HUMANOID environment dedicated to human modeling and animation for general multimedia, VR, and CAD applications integrating virtual humans. We present the design of the system and the integration of the various features: generic modeling of a large class of entities with the BODY data structure, realistic skin deformation for body and hands, facial animation, collision detection, integrated motion control and parallelization of computation intensive tasks

1995

A dynamic wrinkle model in facial animation and skin ageing

Daniel Thalmann, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

The paper describes a dynamic model to simulate expressive wrinkles in 3D facial animation and skin ageing. A skin surface is defined that can slide over an underlying layer, which constrains the surface by a spring force that simulates the connective fat tissue between them. Muscle masks are constructed to characterize the muscular contractions that provide the facial movement. Skin deformation is simulated through an elastic process assembled with visco and plastic units. By adjusting parameters for this

1995

Navigation for digital actors based on synthetic vision, memory, and learning

Daniel Thalmann, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Olivier Renault

The paper describes an animation approach where synthetic vision is used for navigation by a digital actor. The vision is the only channel of information between the actor and its environment and offers a universal approach to pass the necessary information from the environment to an actor in the problems of path searching, obstacle avoidance, and internal knowledge representation with learning and forgetting characteristics. For the general navigation problem, we propose a local and a global approach. In t

Elsevier1995

Interactive human motion control using a closed-form of direct and inverse dynamics

Daniel Thalmann, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

We propose the use of inverse dynamics in a closed form with direct dynamics for interactive motion control of a human skeleton. An efficient recursive algorithm based on Newton-Euler formulae is used to calculate the force and torque produced by a joint actuator in order to fulfill a desired motion. The resulting force and torque are then used in direct dynamics to make the final motion with external force and torque. The Armstrong-Green algorithm is used for direct dynamic simulation. To decrease the erro

World Scientific1994

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Related publications (24)

Computer Animation and Social Agents: 38th International Conference, CASA 2025, Strasbourg, France, June 2–4, 2025, Proceedings

Daniel Thalmann

Springer Nature Singapore2026

Simulation of nonverbal social interaction and small groups dynamics in virtual environments

Anthony Guye-Vuillème

EPFL2004

Style-based Motion Synthesis

Daniel Thalmann, Pascal Fua, Ronan Boulic

Wiley-Blackwell2004

Mahalanobis Motion Generation

Pascal Fua

Representing motions as linear sums of principal components has become a widely accepted animation technique. While powerful, the simplest version of this approach is not particularly well suited to modeling the specific style of an individual whose motion had not yet been recorded when building the database: It would take an expert to adjust the PCA weights to obtain a motion style that is indistinguishable from his. Consequently, when realism is required, current practice is to perform a full motion captu

2004