View-Dependent Formulation of 2.5D Cartoon Models

Abstract: 2.5D cartoon models are methods to simulate three-dimensional (3D)-like movements, such as out-of-plane rotation, from two-dimensional (2D) shapes in different views. However, cartoon objects and characters have several distorted parts which do not correspond to any real 3D positions (e.g., Mickey Mouse's ears), that implies that existing systems are not suitable for designing such representations. Hence, we formulate it as a view-dependent deformation (VDD) problem, which has been proposed in the field of 3D character animation. The distortions in an arbitrary viewpoint are automatically obtained by blending the user-specified 2D shapes of key views. This model is simple enough to easily implement in an existing animation system. Several examples demonstrate the robustness of our method over previous methods. In addition, we conduct a user study and confirm that the proposed system is effective for animating classic cartoon characters.