Intelligent Third-Person Control of 3D Avatar Motion

Interactive control of 3D avatar motions has important applications in computer games and animations. Most of the current games directly map the inputs of a user into canned motions of the 3D character under control. However, an ideal user interface should be more like a human moving in the real life where appropriate motions are chosen according to the environment in the front. In this paper, we have developed an intelligent control interface that helps the user to look ahead a few steps and search a motion library organized in a motion graph for the most appropriate motion for execution. The search is conducted incrementally with the best effort in each frame according to a given available time budget. We have developed a best-first strategy to maintain the search tree in a way that the number of useful nodes is kept as large as possible. Experiments on several example scenes have been conducted to illustrate how this mechanism can enhance the usability of 3D avatar control from a thirdperson view.