CreatureShop: Interactive 3D Character Modeling and Texturing

from a Single Color Drawing

Congyi Zhang1, Lei Yang1, Nenglun Chen1, Nicholas Vining2,3, Alla Sheffer3, Francis C.M. Lau1, Guoping Wang4, Wenping Wang5
1The University of Hong Kong, 2NVIDIA, 3The Univeristy of British Columbia, 4Peking University, 5Texas A&M University
Teaser
CreatureShop converts arbitrary bitmap character drawings (left), using a set of intuitive user annotations (second left), into watertight textured 3D meshes (right). Fox by Natalia Linnik; used with permission.

Abstract

Creating 3D shapes from 2D drawings is an important problem with applications in content creation for computer animation and virtual reality. We introduce a new sketch-based system, CreatureShop, that enables amateurs to create high-quality textured 3D character models from 2D drawings with ease and efficiency. CreatureShop takes an input bitmap drawing of a character (such as an animal or other creature), depicted from an arbitrary descriptive pose and viewpoint, and creates a 3D shape with plausible geometric details and textures from a small number of user annotations on the 2D drawing. Our key contributions are a novel oblique view modeling method, a set of systematic approaches for producing plausible textures on the invisible or occluded parts of the 3D character (as viewed from the direction of the input drawing), and a user-friendly interactive system. We validate our system and methods by creating numerous 3D characters from various drawings, and compare our results with related works to show the advantages of our method. We perform a user study to evaluate the usability of our system, which demonstrates that our system is a practical and efficient approach to create fully-textured 3D character models for novice users.

BibTeX


@ARTICLE{zhang2022creatureshop,
	author={Zhang, Congyi and Yang, Lei and Chen, Nenglun and Vining, Nicholas and Sheffer, Alla and Lau, Francis C.M. and Wang, Guoping and Wang, Wenping},
	journal={IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
	title={CreatureShop: Interactive 3D Character Modeling and Texturing from a Single Color Drawing},
	year={2022},
	pages={1-18},
	doi={10.1109/TVCG.2022.3197560}
}