Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

FUI Collodi (October 2013 - October 2016)

Participants : Francois Faure, Romain Testylier.

This 3-year contract with two industrial partners: TeamTo and Mercenaries Engineering (software for production rendering), is a follow-up and a generalization of Dynam'it. The goal is to propose an integrated software for the animation and final rendering of high-quality movies, as an alternative to the ever-ageing Maya. It will include dynamics similarly to Dynam'it, as well as innovative sketch-based kinematic animation techniques invented a Imagine by Martin Guay and Rémi Ronfard. This contract, started in October, funds 2 engineers for 3 years.

ANR CHROME (01/2012 - 08/2015)

Participant : Rémi Ronfard.

Chrome is a national project funded by the French Research Agency (ANR). The project is coordinated by Julien Pettré, member of MimeTIC. Partners are: Inria-Grenoble IMAGINE team (Remi Ronfard), Golaem SAS (Stephane Donikian), and Archivideo (Francois Gruson). The project has been launched in september 2012. The Chrome project develops new and original techniques to massively populate huge environments. The key idea is to base our approach on the crowd patch paradigm that enables populating environments from sets of pre-computed portions of crowd animation. These portions undergo specific conditions to be assembled into large scenes. The question of visual exploration of these complex scenes is also raised in the project. We develop original camera control techniques to explore the most relevant part of the animations without suffering occlusions due to the constantly moving content. A long-term goal of the project is to enable populating a large digital mockup of the whole France (Territoire 3D, provided by Archivideo). Dedicated efficient human animation techniques are required (Golaem). A strong originality of the project is to address the problem of crowded scene visualisation through the scope of virtual camera control, as task which is coordinated by Imagine team-member Rémi Ronfard.

Three phd students are funded by the project. Kevin Jordao is working on interactive design and animation of digital populations and crowds for very large environments. His advisors are Julien Pettré and Marie-Paule Cani. Quentin Galvanne is working on automatic creation of virtual animation in crowded environments. His advisors are Rémi Ronfard and March Christie (Mimetic team, Inria Bretagne). Julien Pettre. Chen-Kin Lim is working on crowd simulation and rendering of the behaviours of various populations using crowd patches. Her advisors are Rémi Ronfard and March Christie (Mimetic team, Inria Bretagne). Julien Pettre.

AEN MorphoGenetics (10/2012 - 09/2015)

Participant : François Faure.

3-year collaboration with Inria teams Virtual Plants and Demar, as well as INRA (Agricultural research) and the Physics department of ENS Lyon. The goal is to better understand the coupling of genes and mechanical constraints in the morphogenesis (creation of shape) of plants. Our contribution is to create mechanical models of vegetal cells based on microscopy images. This project funds the Ph.D. thesis of Richard Malgat, who started in October, co-advised by François Faure (IMAGINE) and Arezki Boudaoud (ENS Lyon).