Character Modelling with Sketches and ODE-Based Shape Creation

Character models have enormous applications in industry. Efficient creation of detailed character models is an important topic. This paper proposes a new and easy-to-use technique to quickly create detailed character models from sketches. The proposed technique consists of two main components: primitive deformer and shape generators. With this technique, 2D silhouette contours of a character model are drawn or extracted from an image or sketch. Then, proper geometric primitives are selected and aligned with the corresponding 2D silhouette contours. After that, a primitive deformer is used to create a base mesh and three shape generators are used to add 3D details to the base mesh. The primitive deformer and three shape generators are developed from ODE-driven deformations. The primitive deformer deforms the aligned geometric primitives to exactly match the 2D silhouette contours in one view plane and obtains a base mesh of a character model consisting of deformed primitives. The shape generators are used to add 3D details to the base mesh by creating local 3D models. The experimental results demonstrate that the new technique can quickly create detailed 3D character models from sketches with few manual operations. The new technique is physics-based and easy to learn and use.