The Human Body

Thoughts

• Hands are incredibly complicated - it makes sense that nothing less than the full muscle and bone models give really good results. The full body models that are based more on shape matching & mocap data were also pretty impressive, although they tended to lack the detailed dynamics of muscle movement, and seemed incompatible with joint capture of (loose) clothing.
• It’s interesting that a lot of this research still builds on the basic building blocks of linear blend (or dual quat) skinning, blend shapes, and rigging, although the data sources range from mocap to MRIs.
• I assume most of the soft tissue & muscle models require too much computation for real time animation, but I wonder if these will catch on in film - but also perhaps they are too close to the uncanny valley when paired with typically less compelling simulations like facial structure.
• The paper on jointly learning clothing behavior as well as character pose might the future for animating clothes without cloth simulation. Their extension of skinning weights to 3D space via their neural net was a pretty cool idea.