School of Computer Science and Statistics
Rachel McDonnell [MSc Level] We will collaborate with award-winning animation studio Cartoon Saloon to investigate perception of pose for stylized cartoon characters, such as those used in their films. Cartoon characters are often drawn to defy the laws of physics, and there is little known about perception of these characters – what makes a cartoon pose similar … Read more
[FYP or MSc Level] This project will explore the effects of character and environment lighting and how it can be adapted to increase the emotion of a character or user in a VR open-world environment. The student will incorporate lighting theory from cinematography and psychology research into a CG environment, in order to enhance the … Read more
[MSc Level] This project will involve creating a real-time enfacment system from the state of the art deep-fake networks, and conducting perceptual experiments to identify if participants have ownership of their new face, and if properties of the source-actor (e.g., age, gender, etc.) can be perceived, even though the generated video is a photorealistic depiction … Read more
[MSc level] Virtual assistants are becoming commonplace but the ability for them to gesture naturally and appropriately is still a huge research challenge (see image which shows a typical assistant displayed from the neck up, without gesturing arms and hands). In this project, you will develop a method to automatically learn structure from speech sequences … Read more
[MSc level] In this project, you will investigate learned motion matching and how it can be used for embodiment in VR, in particular body-swapping, where the user takes on the motion of somebody else. Student must be taking the Real Time Animation module and also a machine learning module and have strong programming in Unreal … Read more
[FYP or MSc Level] This project will investigate clothing a virtual character using existing cloth plugins (e.g. uDraper or Marvelous Designer), and applying them to photorealistic Metahuman characters in UE5. Cloth simulation will then be tested using Chaos cloth or other, and student will create an embodiment system, where the user can embody a character … Read more
[MSc Level] We will collaborate with award-winning animation studio Cartoon Saloon to investigate animated character body part recognition. This project aims to search through cartoon scenes in order to identify character body parts. This task is more difficult than typical human pose-estimation as cartoon characters are often drawn to defy the laws of physics. Knowledge … Read more
Metahuman characters [FYP] This project is about building an emotional conversational virtual agent in Unreal Engine that can take text as input and produce speech and associated animations on a Metahuman. The main aspect will be learning to work with virtual human animations and programming the to animate in state-machines. The project will involve integrating … Read more