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Deux postes d'ingénieur RV / Animation - Inria Rennes

The MimeTIC team (Inria Rennes) is recruiting 2 engineers on the topics of Avatars and Character Animation. Details are provided below, and candidates should apply directly on the links provided.

Engineer Position: Motion Editing Developments for Character Animation Tools

This engineer position is open in the context of the ANR JCJC Per² project (Perception-based Human Motion Personalisation).

The overall project targets the personalisation of virtual human motions, which have become a requisite to create always more lifelike virtual worlds for industries ranging from entertainment to training and education. Although the visual realism of virtual human motions has drastically improved over the last decades, current animation techniques still create a certain uniformity of motion across characters. For single individuals (e.g., a main character), displaying the same generic motions for all users can limit their engagement, as motions are not personalised for any user. Similarly the absence of variations in large groups of individuals also affects realism when they all move in the same manner. Tremendous amounts of manual artistic work can indeed create such variations, which undeniably improves overall realism (e.g., crowds in computer generated movies like Warcraft, Star Wars, The Hobbit), however it is still impossible to automatically create such levels of personalisation for interactive applications. This project therefore aims at creating variety in human motions, in order to create a new generation of more realistic virtual characters. In short, our goal is to automate the creation of motion variations to represent given individuals according to their own characteristics, and to produce natural variations that are perceived and identified as such by users.

Assignment

In this context, the candidate will participate in the development of a character animation tool developed in the MimeTIC team, as well as participate in the research and developments generally conducted by the group working on Character Animation and Crowd Simulation. This tool is targeting to easily import/export, edit and generate motions, in particular to be used in the context of generating motion variations for large numbers of characters. The candidate will therefore work closely with the PhD student working on the project, as well as with other PhD students involved on related topics.

The person recruited will be in contact with Ludovic Hoyet (MimeTIC team).

Main activities

The engineer will first be tasked with developments on an existing character animation tool (developed in Python), which involves

• Unifying import and export of motion capture data, to be used with external softwares (e.g., Unity)

• Developing a number of animation editing modules

• Ensuring the easy deployment of the tool, to be used by other students

• Developing scenarios and demonstrators for the project to display variety of motions on large scale scenarios

Skills

• Experience in Computer Graphics is essential (MsC or PhD), particularly with Character Animation if possible

• Experience in Python recommended

• Ability of understanding the scientific and technical challenges related to the use of motion capture and motion editing approaches

• Good software development skills, including knowledge of software development processes (e.g., source code management, continuous integration and continuous delivery, tests, agile method)

Remuneration

Monthly gross salary from 2562 euros according to diploma and experience

Instruction to apply

Please submit online : your resume, cover letter and letters of recommendation eventually

Defence Security :

This position is likely to be situated in a restricted area (ZRR), as defined in Decree No. 2011-1425 relating to the protection of national scientific and technical potential (PPST).Authorisation to enter an area is granted by the director of the unit, following a favourable Ministerial decision, as defined in the decree of 3 July 2012 relating to the PPST. An unfavourable Ministerial decision in respect of a position situated in a ZRR would result in the cancellation of the appointment.

Recruitment Policy :

As part of its diversity policy, all Inria positions are accessible to people with disabilities

Warning : you must enter your e-mail address in order to save your application to Inria. Applications must be submitted online on the Inria website. Processing of applications sent from other channels is not guaranteed.

Contacts

Inria Team : MIMETIC

Recruiter :

Hoyet Ludovic / ludovic.hoyet@inria.fr

Engineer Position: Avatars for Virtual Reality

This engineer position is open in the context of the Inria Research challenge “Avatar” http://avatar.inria.fr), which runs from 2018 to 2022. The goal of the project is to design avatars (i.e., the user’s representation in virtual environments) that are better embodied, more interactive and more social, through improving all the pipeline related to avatars, from acquisition and simulation, to designing novel interaction paradigms and multi-sensory feedback. The “Avatar” project involves 6 Inria teams (GraphDeco, Hybrid, Loki, MimeTIC, Morpheo, Potioc), as well as our external academic partner Prof. Mel Slater (Uni. Barcelona) and 2 industrial partners (InterDigital and Faurecia), with use cases targeting primarily demonstrators for the field of immersive cinema (developed in collaboration with our industrial partner InterDigial - VFX/VR team, formerly Technicolor).

Due to the massive dissemination of consumer-grade Head-Mounted Displays and the huge investments from major industrial players, avatars are becoming a major requirement in immersive virtual reality applications, such as immersive media and movies, video games, virtual communities and social networks, sports and industrial training simulations, or medical cybertherapies. In all these applications, ensuring that users embody in an avatar is crucial for making people live a truly immersive and effective experience. For these reasons, an ideal VR experience should involve acquiring automatically, easily and quickly a high quality representation (photo-realistic or stylised) of the user to display in the virtual environment, automatically simulating the movements of this avatar based on the user’s movements, e.g., using intuitive and non-invasive input devices, while enabling users to “sense” the properties of the virtual environment (e.g., physical, social) through their avatar. However, current avatars do not elicit today such immersive and effective experiences. The different Inria teams involved in the “Avatar” challenge have therefore been working together to break through the current technological limitations in the acquisition, simulation and control of avatars, as well as towards providing novel interaction paradigms enabling users to “feel” the virtual world through their avatar.

Assignment

Several pieces of software have been developed by the different Inria teams involved in the challenge over the 2 first years of the project, e.g., to handle avatar calibration, retarget motions on characters with different shapes, customize avatars, or animate and interact with the avatar. The goal is therefore to create a common platform that would be used by the Inria teams working on the topic of avatars, integrating first the minimum tools required to easily set up experiments and demonstrators involving avatars, as well as the relevant other tools developed in the different teams. The candidate will therefore work closely with the PhD students working on the “Avatar” challenge, in order to develop this platform, as well as to ensure that it can be deployed and used by the students and research fellows involved on the project. In the second part of the assignment, a major task will also be to develop demonstrators for the project, in relation to the topic of avatars for immersive cinema.

The person recruited will be in contact with Ludovic Hoyet (MimeTIC team) and Ferran Argelaguet (Hybrid team) for the technical aspects of developing the avatar framework, as well as with Laurent Guillot (MimeTIC team) for the Engineering monitoring.

As the position involves several teams through France, short-term visits to the different teams will also be organised to closely work with all the project members.

Main activities

The engineer will first be tasked with the development of a platform for using and conducting research on avatars (Unity, C#), which involves

Defining the specifications in collaboration with the different teams
- while ensuring the ease of integration of new tools by the students and research fellow working on the project
- while ensuring the possibility of integrating external tools (not Unity or C# based) in the future, such as deep learning based tools developed by some of the teams

Integrating the different motion capture systems used to animate avatars
- Developing standard calibrations for the motion capture systems (calibrating the avatar to the user)
- Integrating motion capture approaches from low to high levels of quality (e.g., mocap, IK based, ...)

Integrating various techniques to interact with and through the avatar

In a second stage (year 2), the engineer will be responsible for developing demonstrators for the project, in relation to the topic of avatars for immersive cinema.

Skills

• Experience in Computer Graphics is essential (MsC or PhD), if possible in Character Animation or Virtual Reality

• Experience in Unity (C#) would be beneficial

• Ability of understanding the scientific and technical challenges related to the development and use of avatars in VR

• Good software development skills, including knowledge of software development processes (e.g., source code management, continuous integration and continuous delivery, tests, agile method)