Direct mesh editing and deformation are key components in the geometric modeling and animation pipeline. Direct mesh editing methods are typically framed as optimization problems combining user-specified vertex constraints with a regularizer that determines the position of the rest of the vertices. The choice of the regularizer is key to the realism and authenticity of the final result. Physics and geometry-based regularizers are not aware of the global context and semantics of the object, and the more recent deep learning priors are limited to a specific class of 3D object deformations. In this work, our main contribution is a local mesh editing method called DragD3D for global context-aware realistic deformation through direct manipulation of a few vertices. DragD3D is not restricted to any class of objects. It achieves this by combining the classic geometric ARAP (as rigid as possible) regularizer with 2D priors obtained from a large-scale diffusion model. Specifically, we render the objects from multiple viewpoints through a differentiable renderer and use the recently introduced DDS loss which scores the faithfulness of the rendered image to one from a diffusion model. DragD3D combines the approximate gradients of the DDS with gradients from the ARAP loss to modify the mesh vertices via neural Jacobian field, while also satisfying vertex constraints. We show that our deformations are realistic and aware of the global context of the objects, and provide better results than just using geometric regularizers.
We present a technique for zero-shot generation of a 3D model using only a target text prompt. Without a generative model or any 3D supervision our method deforms a control shape of a limit subdivided surface along with a texture map and normal map to obtain a 3D model asset that matches the input text prompt and can be deployed into games or modeling applications. We rely only on a pre-trained CLIP model that compares the input text prompt with differentiably rendered images of our 3D model. While previous works have focused on stylization or required training of generative models we perform optimization on mesh parameters directly to generate shape and texture. To improve the quality of results we also introduce a set of techniques such as render augmentations, primitive selection, prompt augmentation that guide the mesh towards a suitable result.
Action recognition, motion classification, gait analysis and synthesis are fundamental problems in a number of fields such as computer graphics, bio-mechanics and human computer interaction that generate a large body of research. This type of data is complex because it is inherently multidimensional and has multiple modalities such as video, motion capture data, accelerometer data, etc. While some of this data, such as monocular video are easy to acquire, others are much more difficult and expensive such as motion capture data or multi-view video. This creates a large barrier of entry in the research community for data driven research. We have embarked on creating a new large repository of motion and action data (CAMREP) consisting of several motion and action databases. What makes this database unique is that we use a variety of modalities, enabling multi-modal analysis. Presently, the size of datasets varies with some having a large number of subjects while others having smaller numbers. We have also acquired long capture sequences in a number of cases, making some datasets rather large.