Section: Overall Objectives

Creation of digital content

Natural scenes present a multitude of similar details, which are never identical and obey specific physical and space repartition laws. Modeling these scenes is thus particularly difficult: it would take years for a designer, and is not easy to do either with a computer. Moreover, interfaces enabling intuitive and fast user control should be provided. Lastly, explicitly storing the information for every detail in a landscape is obviously not possible: procedural models for generating data on the fly, controlled by mid or high-level parameters, thus have to be developed. Our first objective for the next few years is therefore to develop novel methods for specifying a natural scene. This includes modeling the geometry of individual elements, their local appearance, positioning them within a full scene and controlling motion parameters. More precisely, we will investigate:

• New representations and deformation techniques for intuitive shape modeling.

• The exploitation of sketching, annotation and analysis of real-data from video, 3D scanners and other devices for the synthesis and animation of natural scenes.

• The procedural synthesis of geometry, motion and local appearance (texture, shaders) using existing knowledge, user input and/or statistical data.