Synthesizing Mesh Deformation Sequences with Bidirectional LSTM

Abstract

Synthesizing realistic 3D mesh deformation sequences is a challenging but important task in computer animation. To achieve this, researchers have long been focusing on shape analysis to develop new interpolation and extrapolation techniques. However, such techniques have limited learning capabilities and therefore often produce unrealistic deformation. Although there are already networks defined on individual meshes, deep architectures that operate directly on mesh sequences with temporal information remain unexplored due to the following major barriers, irregular mesh connectivity, rich temporal information, and varied deformation. To address these issues, we utilize convolutional neural networks defined on triangular meshes along with a shape deformation representation to extract useful features, followed by long short-term memory (LSTM) that iteratively processes the features. To fully respect the bidirectional nature of actions, we propose a new share-weight bidirectional scheme to better synthesize deformations. An extensive evaluation shows that our approach outperforms existing methods in sequence generation, both qualitatively and quantitatively.