Impostor-based animation of deformable virtual characters with dynamic shadow

This project aims to develop a fast and realistic system for animating virtual characters. Deformations are applied to the human characters to make the model pose naturally. To speed up the animation, each character model is replaced by an impostor. We have devised a novel solution to correct the visibility problem of the impostor by using stencil buffer and bounding box. There have been very few studies to generate shadow for impostor. We propose a novel algorithm with the use of stencil buffer and bounding box for rendering impostor shadow. Our system can generate animations of numerous deformable human models which are substantially faster and of comparable quality than those rendered in geometry. © 2004 IEEE.