Search for: All records

Simulating realistic butterfly motion has been a widely-known challenging problem in computer animation. Arguably, one of its main reasons is the difficulty of acquiring accurate flight motion of butterflies. In this paper we propose a practical yet effective, optical marker-based approach to capture and process the detailed motion of a flying butterfly. Specifically, we first capture the trajectories of the wings and thorax of a flying butterfly using optical marker based motion tracking. After that, our method automatically fills the positions of missing markers by exploiting the continuity and relevance of neighboring frames, and improves the quality of the captured motion via noise filtering with optimized parameter settings. Through comparisons with existing motion processing methods, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to obtain accurate flight motions of butterflies. Furthermore, we created and will release a first-of-its-kind butterfly motion capture dataset to research community. 

Butterflies are not only ubiquitous around the world but are also widely known for inspiring thrill resonance, with their elegant and peculiar flights. However, realistically modeling and simulating butterfly flights—in particular, for real-time graphics and animation applications—remains an under-explored problem. In this article, we propose an efficient and practical model to simulate butterfly flights. We first model a butterfly with parametric maneuvering functions, including wing-abdomen interaction. Then, we simulate dynamic maneuvering control of the butterfly through our force-based model, which includes both the aerodynamics force and the vortex force. Through many simulation experiments and comparisons, we demonstrate that our method can efficiently simulate realistic butterfly flight motions in various real-world settings.