Breathing Life into Shape: Capturing, Modeling and Animating 3D Human Breathing

Figure 1: Animating breathing. Here we add realistic breathing shape deformations to a 3D model of a person running. The Euclidean distances between vertices of the breathing and non-breathing model are color coded (red is large, blue is small). Here the runner is breathing mostly with the chest and the temporal pattern of breathing was animated by a “breath actor.” Modeling how the human body deforms during breathing is im-portant for the realistic animation of lifelike 3D avatars. We learn a model of body shape deformations due to breathing for differ-ent breathing types and provide simple animation controls to ren-der lifelike breathing regardless of body shape. We capture and align high-resolution 3D scans of 58 human subjects. We com-pute deviations from each subject’s mean shape during breathing, and study the statistics of such shape changes for different genders, body shapes, and breathing types. We use the volume of the regis-tered scans as a proxy for lung volume and learn a novel non-linear model relating volume and breathing type to 3D shape deforma-tions and pose changes. We then augment a SCAPE body model so that body shape is determined by identity, pose, and the parame-ters of the breathing model. These parameters provide an intuitive interface with which animators can synthesize 3D human avatars with realistic breathing motions. We also develop a novel inter-face for animating breathing using a spirometer, which measures the changes in breathing volume of a “breath actor.