← ArchivePaper2017
Authoring Motion Cycles
Interactive authoring system for creating cyclic character motions by sketching and blending loop templates via direct manipulation.
Abstract
Motion cycles such as walks and other looping animations play an important role in animation production and game development, yet authoring them relies on general-purpose packages with complex interfaces that require expert training. This work explores the specific challenges of motion cycle authoring and provides a system simple enough for novice animators while retaining the control demanded by experts. The user acts out several loops of a motion using a variety of capture devices, ranging from a mouse to a full body motion-capture suit, and an optimization algorithm automatically extracts a single clean looping cycle from this noisy multidimensional input. A custom curve representation and manipulation tool, called MoCurves, lets the user coordinate spatial and temporal transformations from a single viewport, and a sketch-based contact specification establishes non-slipping planar contacts.
How to read this
- Category
- Method: an interactive motion-cycle authoring system
- Contributions
- An optimization that extracts a single clean looping cycle from several noisy acted-out loops captured via devices ranging from a mouse to a full-body mocap suit
- MoCurves, a custom curve representation and manipulation tool for coordinating spatial and temporal edits from one viewport
- A sketch-based contact specification that establishes non-slipping planar contacts
- Context
- Relates to interactive and performance-driven animation authoring, aiming to give novices the simplicity that general-purpose packages lack while keeping expert-level control.
- Correctness
- Demonstrated as an authoring tool driven by a range of capture devices; the cycle-extraction assumes the user can act out repeated loops, and quality of the cleaned cycle depends on that input, so it is best read as a usability/control contribution rather than a physics guarantee.
- Clarity
- Accessible and tool-oriented; a first pass conveys the workflow, a second pass clarifies the MoCurves representation and the extraction optimization.
- How to read it
- Focus on the MoCurves curve model and the contact-specification scheme; a second pass is worth it for the optimization that turns noisy loops into a single cycle.
Related work
- Autodesk MotionBuilder 2022 2021 / MotionBuilder
- Verbs and Adverbs: Multidimensional Motion Interpolation 1998 / SIGGRAPH
- Automated Extraction and Parameterization of Motions in Large Data Sets 2004 / SIGGRAPH
- Adult2Child: Motion Style Transfer Using CycleGANs 2020 / MIG
Keywords
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