Motion Editing with Prioritized Constraints

We propose an intuitive motion editing technique allowing the end-user to transform an original motion by applying position constraints on freely selected locations of the character body. The major innovation comes from the possibility to assign a priority level to each constraint. The resulting scale of user-defined priority levels allows to handle multiple asynchronously overlapping constraints. As a consequence the end user can enforce a larger range of natural behaviors where conflicting constraints compete to control a common set of joints. By default the joint angles of the original motion are preserved as the lowest priority constraint. However, in case a Cartesian constraint from the original motion is essential, it is straightforward to define a high priority constraint that will retain it before enforcing other lower priority constraints. Additional features are proposed to provide a more productive motion editing process like defining the constraints relative to a mobile frame and precisely specifying which joints are recruited by each constrain. The current limitation remains its computing cost which will be improved in future work.