  Creating 3D shapes from 2D drawings is an important problem with applications
in content creation for computer animation and virtual reality. We introduce a
new sketch-based system, CreatureShop, that enables amateurs to create
high-quality textured 3D character models from 2D drawings with ease and
efficiency. CreatureShop takes an input bitmap drawing of a character (such as
an animal or other creature), depicted from an arbitrary descriptive pose and
viewpoint, and creates a 3D shape with plausible geometric details and textures
from a small number of user annotations on the 2D drawing. Our key
contributions are a novel oblique view modeling method, a set of systematic
approaches for producing plausible textures on the invisible or occluded parts
of the 3D character (as viewed from the direction of the input drawing), and a
user-friendly interactive system. We validate our system and methods by
creating numerous 3D characters from various drawings, and compare our results
with related works to show the advantages of our method. We perform a user
study to evaluate the usability of our system, which demonstrates that our
system is a practical and efficient approach to create fully-textured 3D
character models for novice users.
