Virtual Humans on Stage

We describe a framework for modeling human body parts, animating them, and putting them in "virtual" scene in the context of Virtual Reality. Modeling human bodies for Virtual Reality environments defines some constraints on the way body parts have to be modeled. The modeling has to meet two major goals: the resulting body must be able to be animated, which requires more data structures than the 3D geometric shape, and the animation must run in real-time. To fulfill these two objectives, the modeling of the human body is then much more complex than simply reconstructing its 3D shape. Many more aspects have to be considered, which this paper addresses by describing some efficient approaches. We consider a virtual human as a set of two types of data: the 3D shape and the animation structures. Both are taken into consideration in the modeling process. The resulting human body model can be fed to a scalable human body animation model to simulate virtual humans and clones ready to evolve in..