Planning Character Motions for Shadow Play Animations

In this paper, we propose a shadow play animation system that utilizes motion planning algorithms to generate Chinese shadow play animation automatically according to user’s highlevel inputs. The motion of a character in a shadow play show usually consists of intended primary motion and reactive secondary motion. We propose to use the RRT-Connect algorithm to generate primary motions and design two methods to facilitate the generation of secondary motions. For the character's upper body, we try to bias the search of the planner to generate a path with our preferred motion pattern as much as possible. For the character's lower body, we modify its motion path by a simple pendulum model and some collision-avoidance correction mechanism in a post-processing step. With these methods, we are able to generate realistic compliant motions for a character in a shadow play animation.