System and method for procedural cg eye meniscus
AssigneesSony Pictures Technologies Inc., Sony Corporation
InventorsDaniel Paul Sheerin, John T. Monos
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Systems and methods are disclosed to provide a highly convenient and practically automated system for creation of highly-realistic menisci for CG characters. Creating the meniscus in the correct place and maintaining its correlation with moving eyes and eyelids was in the past difficult. The systems and methods disclosed provide a highly-realistic way to create and control such features. The systems and methods may create the meniscus in a procedural fashion, allowing the meniscus to properly track movements of character eyes and eyelids and to be animated in a highly-realistic fashion.
Claims20
A method of creating an meniscus for a computer-generated object, comprising:
- in a computer-generated object, for a liquid component surrounded by a surface mesh, identifying a loop of the surface mesh surrounding the liquid component as a locus of points for a meniscus to potentially bind to;
- dividing the loop into a number of radial edges, and assigning at least one point per radial edge to create a plurality of points, the points for the meniscus to bind to, at least one point of the plurality not in contact with the liquid component;
- drawing a curve, the curve joining the plurality of points together to form an outer boundary of the meniscus;
- and
- lofting the points by a desired distance to create an inner boundary of the meniscus, the inner and outer boundary forming a ribbon around a portion of the liquid component, the ribbon defining the meniscus.
A meniscus plug-in for a computer-generated modeling application, the plug-in comprising:
- an input module to receive a computer-generated model;
- an analysis module to determine at least one feature of the module in which a liquid component may exhibit a meniscus;
- and
- a meniscus module to procedurally modify the model or procedurally add to the model to cause a meniscus to appear.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.