3D paper-cut modeling and animation

Paper-cut is one of the most characteristic Chinese folk arts, often used during festivals and celebrations. Chinese artists have used paper-cut to make animations. Typical paper-cut artwork is made with 2D illustrations on paper, and making many frames necessary for an entire animation can be tedious and expensive. We present a system that allows a designer to directly annotate a 3D model with paper-cut patterns, while still allowing for adding an artistic touch to the design. We have designed special motifs coupled with templates, resulting in a parameterized set of decorative paper-cut patterns which give the artist flexible control and allow editing of the pattern size, orientation, and shape. The artist chooses a pattern and places the pattern on the model in the desired position. The system determines actual surface coverage and trims the object’s surface geometry to simulate the cut-out effect we observe in traditional 2D paper-cut art. We demonstrate that our system allows faster and easier addition of paper-cut decoration to 3D models compared to general purpose modeling tools, such as Maya. Animations made with the 3D paper-cut models escape from the limitations of traditional 2D paper-cut animation on the movement in perspective, furthermore, our system allows for easy pattern animations on 3D models, which is very powerful but hard to do with traditional paper-cut animation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.