4-D movies capture every jiggle, creating realistic digital avatars
Monday, August 10, 2015 - 07:31
in Biology & Nature
"Everybody jiggles," according to Dr. Michael Black, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Tübingen, Germany. "We may not like it, but how we jiggle says a lot about who we are. Our soft tissue (otherwise known as fat and muscle) deforms, wobbles, waves, and bounces as we move. These motions may provide clues about our risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. They also make us look real. Digital characters either lack natural soft-tissue motion or require time-consuming animation to make them believable". Now researchers at MPI-IS have captured people and how people jiggle in exacting detail and have created realistic 3D avatars that bring natural body motions to digital characters.