Creating light-weight virtual humans for Virtual Environments

With the advent of whole body, 3D electro-optical scanners, a new range of applications are emerging that exploit the availability of personalised, realistic human models. However, realistic rendering of such models usually entails a large number of polygons which can be unacceptable in many applications. We present a framework that exploits the approximate cylindrical and spherical symmetry of human body parts to create light-weight representations that retain the overall dimension of body parts, even at very low polygon counts. __________________________________________________________________________________________