[SIGGRAPH2022] Artemis: Articulated Neural Pets with Appearance and Motion Synthesis

Project: haiminluo.gith...
We humans are entering into a virtual era, and surely want to bring animals to the virtual world as well for companion. Humans are entering into a virtual era, while our companions, i.e., animals, are left bind. Yet, computer-generated (CGI) furry animals are limited by tedious off-line rendering, let alone interactive motion control. Computer-generated (CGI) furry animals are limited by tedious off-line rendering, and hence impractical for interactive motion control. In this paper, we present ARTEMIS, a novel neural modeling and rendering pipeline for generating ARTiculated neural pets with appEarance and Motion synthesIS. Our ARTEMIS enables interactive motion control, real-time animation, and photo-realistic rendering of furry animals. The core of our ARTEMIS is a neural-generated (NGI) animal engine, which adopts an efficient octree-based representation for animal animation and fur rendering. The animation then becomes equivalent to voxel-level deformation based on explicit skeletal warping. We further use a fast octree indexing an efficient volumetric rendering scheme to generate appearance and density features maps. Finally, we propose a novel shading network to generate high-fidelity details of appearance and opacity under novel poses from appearance and density feature maps. For the motion control module in ARTEMIS, we combine state-of-the-art animal motion capture approach with the recent neural character control scheme. We introduce an effective optimization scheme to reconstruct skeletal motion of real animals captured by a multi-view RGB and Vicon camera array. We feed all the captured motion into a neural character control scheme to generate abstract control signals with motion styles. We further integrate ARTEMIS into existing engines that support VR headsets, providing an unprecedented immersive experience where a user can intimately interact with a variety of virtual animals with vivid movements and photo-realistic appearance. Extensive experiments and showcases demonstrate the effectiveness of our ARTEMIS system to achieve highly realistic rendering of NGI animals in real-time, providing daily immersive and interactive experience with digital animals unseen before.
Haimin Luo, Teng Xu, Yuheng Jiang, Chenglin Zhou, Qiwei Qiu, Yingliang Zhang, Wei Yang, Lan Xu, Jingyi Yu,
Artemis: Articulated Neural Pets with Appearance and Motion Synthesis,
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH 2022).