Contact Edit: Artist Tools for Intuitive Modeling of Hand-Object Interactions
Arjun S. LakshmipathyNicole FengYu Xi LeeMoshe MahlerNancy S. Pollard
ACM Transactions on Graphics (2023)
teaser

Posing high-contact interactions is challenging and time-consuming, with hand-object interactions being especially difficult due to the large number of degrees of freedom (DOF) of the hand and the fact that humans are experts at judging hand poses. This paper addresses this challenge by elevating contact areas to first-class primitives. We provide end-to-end art-directable (EAD) tools to model interactions based on contact areas, directly manipulate contact areas, and compute corresponding poses automatically. To make these operations intuitive and fast, we present a novel axis-based contact model that supports real-time approximately isometry-preserving operations on triangulated surfaces, permits movement between surfaces, and is both robust and scalable to large areas. We show that use of our contact model facilitates high quality posing even for unconstrained, high-DOF custom rigs intended for traditional keyframe-based animation pipelines. We additionally evaluate our approach with comparisons to prior art, ablation studies, user studies, qualitative assessments, and extensions to full-body interaction.

Arjun S. Lakshmipathy, Nicole Feng, Yu Xi Lee, Moshe Mahler, Nancy S. Pollard (2023). Contact Edit: Artist Tools for Intuitive Modeling of Hand-Object Interactions. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 42(4).

@article{lakshmipathy2023contactedit,
author = {Arjun S. Lakshmipathy and Nicole Feng and Yu Xi Lee and Moshe Mahler and Nancy S. Pollard},
year = {2023},
title = {Contact Edit: Artist Tools for Intuitive Modeling of Hand-Object Interactions},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics},
volume = {42},
number = {4},
articleno = {45},
month = {jul},
numpages = {20},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3592117},
doi = {10.1145/3592117},
issue_date = {August 2023},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}