Flow-Guided Stylized Keyframe Animation

Abstract:

We present a method that combines hand-drawn artwork with fluid simulations to produce animated fluids in the visual style of the artist's drawings. Given a fluid simulation and a set of keyframes rendered by an artist in any medium, our system produces a set of in-betweens that visually matches the style of the keyframes and roughly follows the motion from the underlying simulation. Our method builds on recent advances in patch-based regenerative morphing and image melding to produce temporally coherent sequences with visual fidelity to the target medium. Because direct application of these methods results in motion that is generally not fluid-like, we augment them to produce motion closely matching that of the underlying simulation. We demonstrate our method with animations in a variety of visual styles. We also present initial experiments that suggest our approach holds promise for other applications, including rotoscoping video (using optical flow instead of simulated velocity fields) and providing temporal coherence for artistic image processing filters.