High-level Shape Representations for Content Creation

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We propose to investigate high-level representations to facilitate content creation. The creation of geometric content is an important task in areas such as computer graphics and animation, visual effects, game development, and fabrication-oriented design. The most common approach for creating 3D content is by directly modeling the geometry of 3D shapes. However, modeling is a laborious task where artists need to be skilled to use the conventional software tools, which typically involve working on low-level shape representations, e.g., triangle meshes. ***Thus, during the last decade, efforts in computer graphics have focused on the task of facilitating the creation of 3D models. A recent trend towards this direction is to represent shapes as a collection of primitives defined at a more semantic level, e.g., shape parts (such as the legs, seat and back of a chair). These representations allow manipulating shapes at a more abstract level, independently of the underlying low-level representation. High-level representations can also be used to synthesize new models or to guide the modeling of shapes or exploration of a shape space by capturing additional aspects of the structure and appearance of shapes.***In this context, the goal of the proposed research program is to develop high-level representations for shape manipulation and synthesis to facilitate the creation of geometric content, especially 3D shapes. The successful use of such representations requires three components: 1) A shape representation that is suitable for the target applications; 2) Algorithms that automatically or semi-automatically build the representations for existing geometric data; and 3) Guiding mechanisms that allow a user to employ the representations for content creation. Thus, these three components comprise the research streams of the program. ***In the first stream, we will investigate the design of shape representations that are more suitable for manipulation and synthesis. In the second stream, our goal is to study how big data analytics can lead to significant advancements in shape analysis, and facilitate the automatic construction of the high-level representations. In the third stream, we will investigate the development of guiding mechanisms that can support creative modeling. We expect that, in the long term, this program can contribute to facilitating the creation of content and thus be of interest to the design and entertainment industries.