<p>Robert De Niro piled on the pounds for his Oscar-winning turn in "Raging Bull", and Christian Bale starved himself to the point of emaciation for "The Machinist".<br /><br />Scientists have developed a new kind of image manipulation software that promises to allow filmmakers to alter the appearance of their actors without resorting to time-consuming frame-by-frame digital touch-ups.<br /><br />What has until now taken either the most dedicated of actors, or a painstakingly slow process of computer editing, can be done in a relatively short period of time, reports the Daily Mail.<br /><br />The new software, called MovieReShape, has been developed by Christian Theobalt and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany.<br /><br />The researchers generated 3D scans of 120 men and women of varying shapes and sizes pulling various poses, according to New Scientist magazine.<br /><br />They then fed these scans into a computer, merging them together to create a single model that can be morphed into any desired pose.</p>.<p>Programmers can then use existing software to track an actor's silhouette throughout a sequence of frames, and then map the silhouette onto the malleable 3-D model.<br /><br />The software can be manipulated to simultaneously adjust an actor's height, weight and muscle tone, without having to resort to the painfully slow process of digital touch-ups, one frame at a time.<br /><br />So, are the days of actors embarking on potentially dangerous diets to alter their physical appearance gone forever?<br /><br />Theobalt said: "The actor wouldn't need to go to all that trouble."</p>
<p>Robert De Niro piled on the pounds for his Oscar-winning turn in "Raging Bull", and Christian Bale starved himself to the point of emaciation for "The Machinist".<br /><br />Scientists have developed a new kind of image manipulation software that promises to allow filmmakers to alter the appearance of their actors without resorting to time-consuming frame-by-frame digital touch-ups.<br /><br />What has until now taken either the most dedicated of actors, or a painstakingly slow process of computer editing, can be done in a relatively short period of time, reports the Daily Mail.<br /><br />The new software, called MovieReShape, has been developed by Christian Theobalt and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany.<br /><br />The researchers generated 3D scans of 120 men and women of varying shapes and sizes pulling various poses, according to New Scientist magazine.<br /><br />They then fed these scans into a computer, merging them together to create a single model that can be morphed into any desired pose.</p>.<p>Programmers can then use existing software to track an actor's silhouette throughout a sequence of frames, and then map the silhouette onto the malleable 3-D model.<br /><br />The software can be manipulated to simultaneously adjust an actor's height, weight and muscle tone, without having to resort to the painfully slow process of digital touch-ups, one frame at a time.<br /><br />So, are the days of actors embarking on potentially dangerous diets to alter their physical appearance gone forever?<br /><br />Theobalt said: "The actor wouldn't need to go to all that trouble."</p>