Flexible Motion In-betweening with Diffusion Models

Motion in-betweening, a fundamental technique in animation, has long been recognized as a labor-intensive and challenging process. We investigate the potential of diffusion models in generating diverse human motions guided by keyframes. Unlike previous inbetweening methods, we propose a simple unified model capable of generating precise and diverse motions that conform to a flexible range of user-specified constraints, as well as text conditioning.

Interactive Character Control with Auto-Regressive Motion Diffusion Models

Real-time character control is an essential component for interactive experiences, with a broad range of applications, including but not limited to physics simulations, video games, and virtual reality. The success of diffusion models for image synthesis has led to recent works exploring the use of these models for motion synthesis. However, the majority of these motion diffusion models are primarily designed for offline applications, where space-time models are used to synthesize an entire sequence of frames simultaneously with a pre-specified length.

Surface-Filling Curve Flows via Implicit Medial Axes

We introduce a fast, robust, and user-controllable algorithm to generate surface-filling curves. We compute these curves through the gradient flow of a simple sparse energy, making our method several orders of magnitude faster than previous works. Our algorithm makes minimal assumptions on the topology and resolution of the input surface, achieving improved robustness. Our framework provides tuneable parameters that guide the shape of the output curve, making it ideal for interactive design applications.

Real-Time Neural Appearance Models

We present a complete system for real-time rendering of scenes with complex appearance previously reserved for offline use. This is achieved with a combination of algorithmic and system level innovations.

Fluid Control with Laplacian Eigenfunctions

Physics-based fluid control has long been a challenging problem in balancing efficiency and accuracy. We introduce a novel physics-based fluid control pipeline using Laplacian Eigenfluids. Utilizing the adjoint method with our provided analytical gradient expressions, the derivative computation of the control problem is efficient and easy to formulate. We demonstrate that our method is fast enough to support real-time fluid simulation, editing, control, and optimal animation generation. Our pipeline naturally supports multi-resolution and frequency control of fluid simulations.

Stabler Neo-Hookean Simulation: Absolute Eigenvalue Filtering for Projected Newton

Volume-preserving hyperelastic materials are widely used to model near-incompressible materials such as rubber and soft tissues. However, the numerical simulation of volume-preserving hyperelastic materials is notoriously challenging within this regime due to the non-convexity of the energy function. In this work, we identify the pitfalls of the popular eigenvalue clamping strategy for projecting Hessian matrices to positive semi-definiteness during Newton's method.

Simplicits: Mesh-Free, Geometry-Agnostic, Elastic Simulation

The proliferation of 3D representations, from explicit meshes to implicit neural fields and more, motivates the need for simulators agnostic to representation. We present a data-, mesh-, and grid-free solution for elastic simulation for any object in any geometric representation undergoing large, nonlinear deformations. We note that every standard geometric representation can be reduced to an occupancy function queried at any point in space, and we define a simulator atop this common interface.

Diffusion Texture Painting

We present a technique that leverages 2D generative diffusion models (DMs) for interactive texture painting on the surface of 3D meshes. Unlike existing texture painting systems, our method allows artists to paint with any complex image texture, and in contrast with traditional texture synthesis, our brush not only generates seamless strokes in real-time, but can inpaint

A Differential Monte Carlo Solver For the Poisson Equation

The Poisson equation is an important partial differential equation (PDE) with numerous applications in physics, engineering, and computer graphics. Conventional solutions to the Poisson equation require discretizing the domain or its boundary, which can be very expensive for domains with detailed geometries. To overcome this challenge, a family of grid-free Monte Carlo solutions has recently been developed. By utilizing walk-on-sphere (WoS) processes, these techniques are capable of efficiently solving the Poisson equation over complex domains.

SuperPADL: Scaling Language-Directed Physics-Based Control with Progressive Supervised Distillation

Physically-simulated models for human motion can generate high-quality responsive character animations, often in real-time. Natural language serves as a flexible interface for controlling these models, allowing expert and non-expert users to quickly create and edit their animations. Many recent physics-based animation methods, including those that use text interfaces, train control policies using reinforcement learning (RL). However, scaling these methods beyond several hundred motions has remained challenging.