SimpModeling: Sketching Implicit Field to Guide Mesh Modeling for 3D Animalmorphic Head Design

TL;DR

SimpModeling is a sketch-based system that enables easy and controllable 3D animalmorphic head modeling by separating coarse shape design from detail crafting, utilizing implicit shape inference for improved accuracy and user control.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel two-stage sketch-based system for 3D animal head modeling that enhances controllability and accuracy using implicit shape inference and a new high-quality dataset.

Findings

Effective separation of coarse shape and detail design improves control.

Implicit shape inference handles domain gap between sketches and training data.

User studies confirm system usability and effectiveness.

Abstract

Head shapes play an important role in 3D character design. In this work, we propose SimpModeling, a novel sketch-based system for helping users, especially amateur users, easily model 3D animalmorphic heads - a prevalent kind of heads in character design. Although sketching provides an easy way to depict desired shapes, it is challenging to infer dense geometric information from sparse line drawings. Recently, deepnet-based approaches have been taken to address this challenge and try to produce rich geometric details from very few strokes. However, while such methods reduce users' workload, they would cause less controllability of target shapes. This is mainly due to the uncertainty of the neural prediction. Our system tackles this issue and provides good controllability from three aspects: 1) we separate coarse shape design and geometric detail specification into two stages and respectively provide different sketching means; 2) in coarse shape designing, sketches are used for both shape inference and geometric constraints to determine global geometry, and in geometric detail crafting, sketches are used for carving surface details; 3) in both stages, we use the advanced implicit-based shape inference methods, which have strong ability to handle the domain gap between freehand sketches and synthetic ones used for training. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our method and the usability of our interactive system. We also contribute to a dataset of high-quality 3D animal heads, which are manually created by artists.