New Technique Adds Muscle to Animated Characters

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New software from Bournemouth University will allow animators to ‘flesh out’ their characters from the outside appearance. (Image credit: Bournemouth University)

Skeletons and muscles are conjured automatically for computer-animated characters using a new technique that helps them move more realistically.

This research could accelerate the production pace of increasingly popular animated movies from studios such as Pixar.

That approach is, however, counterintuitive.

"You don't start with a drawing of a character, you start with what's underneath. That can be confusing," researcher Jian Zhang, director of the computer-animation research center at Bournemouth University in England, told LiveScience.

Instead, Zhang and his colleagues' new method, developed over the last three or so years, takes animated characters, scans their surface geometries and works from the outside in, automatically embedding skeletons and muscles. The results are anatomies that flow naturally.

"Creating a realistic human or humanoid computer-animated character is quite tricky," Zhang said. "This work will help reduce all the tedious labor of manually putting in the skeleton and muscles."

The method works well on muscular characters. Future research will further investigate how to more realistically create characters with more fat on them, Zhang said. He and his colleagues reported their findings in August in the journal Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds.

Charles Q. Choi
Charles Q. Choi
Live Science Contributor
Charles Q. Choi is a contributing writer for Live Science and Space.com. He covers all things human origins and astronomy as well as physics, animals and general science topics. Charles has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, School of Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Florida. Charles has visited every continent on Earth, drinking rancid yak butter tea in Lhasa, snorkeling with sea lions in the Galapagos and even climbing an iceberg in Antarctica.