E-StopMotion: digitizing stop motion for enhanced animation and games

Stop Motion Animation is the traditional craft of giving life to handmade models. The unique look and feel of this art form is hard to reproduce with 3D computer generated techniques. This is due to the unexpected details that appear from frame to frame and to the sometimes choppy appearance of the character movement. The artist's task can be overwhelming as he has to reshape a character into hundreds of poses to obtain just a few seconds of animation. The results of the animation are usually applied in 2D mediums like films or platform games. Character features that took a lot of effort to create thus remain unseen. We propose a novel system that allows the creation of 3D stop motion-like animations from 3D character shapes reconstructed from multi-view images. Given two or more reconstructed shapes from key frames, our method uses a combination of non-rigid registration and as-rigid-as-possible interpolation to generate plausible in-between shapes. This significantly reduces the artist's workload since much fewer poses are required. The reconstructed and interpolated shapes with complete 3D geometry can be manipulated even further through deformation techniques. The resulting shapes can then be used as animated characters in games or fused with 2D animation frames for enhanced stop motion films.