Shadow Theatre: Discovering Human Motion from a Sequence of Silhouettes (SIGGRAPH 2016)

mrl.snu.ac.kr/research/Project...
Abstract
Shadow theatre is a genre of performance art in which the actors are only visible as shadows projected on the screen. The goal of this study is to generate animated characters, the shadows of which match a sequence of target silhouettes. This poses several challenges. The motion of multiple characters are carefully coordinated to form a target silhouette on the screen, and each character's pose should be stable, balanced, and plausible. The resulting character animation should be smooth and coherent spatially and temporally. We formulate the problem as nonlinear constrained optimization with objectives, which were designed to generate plausible human motions. Our optimization algorithm was primarily inspired by the heuristic strategies of professional shadow theatre actors. Their know-how was studied and then incorporated into our optimization formulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a variety of target silhouettes and 3D fabrication of the results.
Publication
Jungdam Won, Jehee Lee,
Shadow Theatre: Discovering Human Motion from a Sequence of Silhouettes,
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2016).

[@Johnmoments]

This is the best vid about this topic that ive ever seen.

[@WhiteDragon103]

When/how does the system decide to use props to complete a target shape?

[@KnakuanaRka]

Zergling Probably based on the presence of too-thin features (wheel spokes, knobs on the violin neck) or other cases where acceptable shapes cannot be found (plane wings).