Structures: hierarchical motion representation for stylized rendering – Structures

The Structures project proposes to study new approaches for the creation of stylized animated films in connection with traditional artistic practices. Our environment is surrounded by images and films. Stylized images carry the visual identity and atmosphere of an artistic movement, an artist or a business. This is why artists need both great freedom and precise control over the appearance of the image to express their style when creating images or animations. Unfortunately, with the current tools and stylization techniques, there is still a lot of manual work to create animations that express the artistic intent of the content creator. This not only limits the quality and variety of styles, but also dramatically increases production costs. As part of our project, the term style design the visual appearance of the images constituting the animation.
Our project answers the following questions:
- How could the industrial production pipeline be better adapted to the artist to produce productions of a quality similar to that of handmade productions?
- What are the motion information to describe and how to model this motion to guide stylization?
- What is the motion to describe and how to model this motion to guide stylization?
To answer these questions, the Structures project addresses the following challenges:
- understand the stylization process followed by artists to create animations and study motion stylization models simulating this process;
- define how to represent the motion of the input scene so that the stylization process has access to relevant information;
- establish a vocabulary to describe existing styles;
- define a style control mechanism adapted to artists.

These challenges fall under two scientific disciplines: computer graphics and visual arts sciences. We propose a new approach associating researchers and practitioners in computer graphics and art sciences. The Structures project team covers the different skills and knowledge needed to conduct this research.
The Structures project focuses on the artistic creation of hand-drawn animation with traditional tools such as pencils, pastels, painting. Even though every production of this type has its own production pipeline, we are convinced that common practices can be identified. This will allow us to understand how the motion information of an input scene is related to the style. The objective is to propose a model of representation of the motion of the geometry and the motion of the appearance. This model will guide the process of stylization. To this end, we need to formalize the drawing process and define stylization algorithms that implement this process.
We will define an intermediate representation between the input scene and the stylization to guide the control of the style. This representation will be motivated by artistic practices and will provide new controls in accordance with the artists' vocabulary. The results will be a dictionary of styles covering artists' vocabulary as well as a stylization pipeline. We will develop stylization algorithms with improved control through the use of our motion representation structure. These results will have a direct impact on visual communication, for the creation of animation. We also hope to better understand the artistic process of creating stylized animations and have an impact on visual arts science.