Contact Edit: Artist Tools for Intuitive Modeling of Hand-Object Interactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces artist-friendly tools for intuitive modeling of hand-object interactions by elevating contact areas as primary primitives, enabling real-time, scalable, and high-quality pose editing for complex interactions.

Contribution

It presents a novel axis-based contact model supporting real-time, isometry-preserving operations on triangulated surfaces, enhancing the intuitiveness and efficiency of modeling high-contact interactions.

Findings

Facilitates high-quality posing for complex hand-object interactions.

Supports real-time, isometry-preserving manipulations on surfaces.

Proves effective for unconstrained, high-DOF character rigs.

Abstract

Posing high-contact interactions is challenging and time-consuming, with hand-object interactions being especially difficult due to the large number of degrees of freedom (DOF) of the hand and the fact that humans are experts at judging hand poses. This paper addresses this challenge by elevating contact areas to first-class primitives. We provide \textit{end-to-end art-directable} (EAD) tools to model interactions based on contact areas, directly manipulate contact areas, and compute corresponding poses automatically. To make these operations intuitive and fast, we present a novel axis-based contact model that supports real-time approximately isometry-preserving operations on triangulated surfaces, permits movement between surfaces, and is both robust and scalable to large areas. We show that use of our contact model facilitates high quality posing even for unconstrained, high-DOF custom rigs intended for traditional keyframe-based animation pipelines. We additionally evaluate our approach with comparisons to prior art, ablation studies, user studies, qualitative assessments, and extensions to full-body interaction.