CreatureShop: Interactive 3D Character Modeling and Texturing from a Single Color Drawing

TL;DR

CreatureShop is an interactive system that allows users to easily generate textured 3D character models from single 2D drawings, combining novel modeling techniques with user-friendly interaction.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel oblique view modeling method and systematic texture generation approaches for creating 3D characters from 2D sketches, suitable for novices.

Findings

Successfully creates high-quality textured 3D characters from simple drawings.

User study confirms system's practicality and efficiency for beginners.

Outperforms related methods in quality and usability.

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.