TraceMove: A Data-assisted Interface for Sketching 2D Character Animation

In this paper we present TraceMove, a system to help novice animators create 2D, hand-drawn, character animation. The system and interface assists not only in sketching the character properly but also in animating it. A database of image frames from recorded videos of humans performing various motions, is used to provide pose silhouette suggestions as a static pose hint to the users as they draw the character. The user can trace and draw over the generated suggestions to create the sketch of the pose. Then the sketch of the next frame of the animation being drawn is automatically generated by the system as a moving pose hint. In order to do this, the user marks the skeleton of the character in a single sketched pose, and a motion capture database is used to predict the skeleton for the subsequent frame. The sketched pose is then deformed to match predicted skeleton pose. Furthermore, the sketch generated by the system for any frame can always be edited by the animator. This lets novice artists and animators generate hand drawn 2D animated characters with minimal effort.