School of Computer Science and Statistics
Rachel McDonnell [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 … 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
CitizenMetaOne Youtuber live capture setup [FYP or MSc level] Become a virtual youtuber, and create your own live Metahuman system setup, using HTC Vive controllers for tracking the hands and a webcam for capturing the face. This project will use pre-existing animation plugins in Unreal Engine as a starting point (Faceware for the facial capture, … Read more
[MSc] In this project, you will first generate a database of cloth simulation for a single character performing a large range of motions, from a mocap database. You will use a commercial cloth simulation software to create the deformations (e.g., Houdini, Maya, UE4 cloth etc.). Then, the idea is to create a neural network that … Read more
[FYP level] In this project, the student will run a number of experiments investigating perception of faces and facial expressions on realistically rendered and toon-rendered virtual faces. A large part of the work will be generating the stimuli, which will be done using a combination of Maya, Marmoset Toolbag, Mudbox, and Russian3DScanner. This project is … Read more