Stylizing Animation By Example

Pierre Benard, Forrester Cole, Michael Kass, Igor Mordatch, James Hegarty, Martin Sebastian Senn, Kurt Fleischer, Davide Pesare, Katherine Breeden

Abstract:

Skilled artists, using traditional media or modern computer painting tools, can create a variety of expressive styles that are very appealing in still images, but have been unsuitable for animation. The key difficulty is that existing techniques lack adequate temporal coherence to animate these styles effectively. Here we augment the range of practical animation styles by extending the guided texture synthesis method of Image Analogies [Hertzmann et al, 2001] to create temporally coherent animation sequences.

To make the method art directable, we allow artists to paint portions of keyframes that are used as constraints. The in-betweens calculated by our method maintain stylistic continuity and yet change no more than necessary over time.

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [ComputerGraphicsWorldArticle.pdf], [PaintTweenDistro.tgz], [PaintTweenWorkingSets.tgz], [additionalResults.mov], [mainVideo.mov]

Available in the proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2013.

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #13-03