Realistic modeling of the human body in 3D has many applications ranging from fashion to the production of movies and video games. However, leveraging data coming from state-of-the-art 3D acquisition systems poses a set of problems. A 3D scan of a person contains holes and thousands of unordered points. In addition, a 3D scan is a single snapshot of the human body in time, while the shape of the human body changes with motion, breathing, aging, etc. In this talk, I will present parts of the whole process of modeling the human body in 3D. First, I will describe a method for finding sparse pairwise correspondences between 3D triangular meshes of articulated objects, such as humans, in various shapes and poses. Then, I will present an approach for extracting standard anthropometric measurements from 3D human scans.

Finally, I will talk in more detail about a method for capturing and modeling the non-rigid intrinsic shape variation of the human body during breathing. In this work, we learn a detailed model of body shape deformations due to breathing for different breathing types and provide simple animation controls to render lifelike breathing regardless of body shape. We also develop a novel interface for breathing animation using a spirometer, which measures the breathing volume of a "breath actor". Our approach generates fine-scale body shape deformations due to breathing with greater ease and realism than previously achieved.