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Motion Warping

Zoran Popovic, Andrew Witkin

SIGGRAPHAcademic739 cites49 descendantsRetargeting

Motion editing technique warping captured animations to meet user-defined spacetime constraints while preserving dynamic continuity.

Abstract

This paper introduces motion warping, a technique for editing captured or keyframed animation by warping the motion parameter curves. The animator interactively defines keyframe-like constraints that derive a smooth deformation preserving the fine high-frequency structure of the original motion, while time warp constraints retime the motion via an interpolating Cardinal spline. Motion clips are combined by overlapping and blending the parameter curves with a slow-in/slow-out weight function. The authors show that whole families of realistic motions, such as varied human walks and tennis swings, can be created from a single captured sequence using only a few warping keyframes.

How to read this

Category
Method: a motion-editing technique
Contributions
  • Motion warping: editing captured or keyframed animation by warping its parameter curves to meet keyframe-like constraints while preserving fine high-frequency detail
  • Time-warp constraints that retime motion via an interpolating Cardinal spline
  • Blending of overlapping clips with a slow-in/slow-out weight function to synthesize motion families from a single sequence
Context
Builds on keyframe-animation lineage (Burtnyk and Wein's interactive skeleton key-frame techniques) and underpins later constraint-based editing such as Gleicher's retargeting.Builds on: Interactive Skeleton Techniques for Enhancing Motion Dynamics in Key Frame Animation
Correctness
Demonstrated on motions like human walks and tennis swings; it is a signal-deformation method with no notion of physics, so warped results preserve style but are not guaranteed to remain physically plausible.
Clarity
Accessible; a first pass conveys the idea, do a second pass for the curve-warping and time-warp formulation.
How to read it
First pass for the warp-the-curves intuition and the constraint types; second pass to understand the deformation and retiming math if you plan to implement editing.

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