INTERACTIVE MODELLING OF MPEG-4 DEFORMABLE HUMAN BODY MODELS Hyewon Seo, Frederic Cordier, Laurent Philippon, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann MlRALab, University of Geneva, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland Key words: Deformation, simplifieation, MPEG-4 BDP, seamless body, animation ready model. Abstract: Aequisition of various human body models is useful in many eases. In this paper, we present some of our reeent work on body ereation tools. Our goal is to enable rapid creation of various body models that are immediately usable for animation. In doing so, we aim to earry out realistie deformations on the human body models as weil as make its usage simple. Our system is eomposed of several modules: (1) Skin attaehment to an H-Anim skeleton is earried out first in order to get deformation in skeletal shape modifieation as weil as in animation. (2) Volumetrie deformation module deals with the volumetrie seale of body parts sueh as breast, belly and bottoms. These deformation operators, together with the skeletal deformation allow the automatie adaptation of the body model to different sizes and proportions to aeeommodate anthropometrie al variations. (3) Surfaee optirnization is used to simplify the model in eonsideration of not only geometrie features but also the animation aspeet of it. (4) Finally, the BDP generation module deseribes the geometry of the model as weil as how to animate it aeeording to the MPEG-4 BDP speeifieations. 1. INTRODUCTION In recent years, human characters have become more and more important in computer animation, virtual reality, entertainment, e-commerce and many other areas. Amongst many of the relevant techniques, model acquisition of the human character model has been attracted considerable attention from 120 N. Magnenat-Thalmann et al. (eds.), Deformable Avatars © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2001