Keyframe or Motion Capture? Reflections on Education of Character Animation

OptiMo: Optimization-Guided Motion Editing for Keyframe Character Animation

The mission of animators is to create nuanced, high-quality character motions. To achieve this, the careful editing of animation curves—curves that determine how a series of keyframed poses are interpolated over time—is an important task. Manual editing affords full and precise control, but requires tedious and nonintuitive trials and errors. Numerical optimization can automate such exploration...

Character Animation from Motion Capture Data

Adding Hand Motion to the Motion Capture Based Character Animation

Most character motion capture data does not contain secondary motions like detailed hand motion, therefore the resultant animation looks unnatural due to the stiffness of hand motion. In this paper, we analyzed the pose space distance from the character’s motion capture data and used stepwise searching algorithm to find the key poses for hand motion synthesis. We adaptively changed the contrast...

A Brief History of Motion Capture for Computer Character Animation

Motion capture is the recording of human body movement (or other movement) for immediate or delayed analysis and playback. The information captured can be as general as the simple position of the body in space or as complex as the deformations of the face and muscle masses. Motion capture for computer character animation involves the mapping of human motion onto the motion of a computer charact...

Interactive Video-Based Motion Capture for Character Animation

We combine techniques from interactive computer graphics and automated computer vision to extract articulated body movement from video. Active contours and techniques from image processing are used to identify features and establish feature relationships from frame to frame. A threedimensional hierarchical model is associated with active contours, which then kinematically “pull” the model along...