Parameterized Animated Activities

We propose a metadata representation that describes which aspects of an animation can be varied.

This work addresses the development of a character animation editing method that accommodates animation changes while preserving the animator’s original artistic intent. Our goal is to give the artist control over the automatic editing of animations by extending them with artist-defined metadata. We propose a metadata representation that describes which aspects of an animation can be varied. To make the authoring process easier, we have developed an interface for specifying the metadata. Our method extracts a collection of trajectories of both effectors and objects for the animation. We approximate and parameterize the trajectories with a series of cubic Bézier curves. Then, we generate a set of high-level parameters for editing which are related to trajectory deformations. The only possible deformations are those that preserve the fine structure of the original motion. From the trajectories, we use inverse kinematics to generate a new animation that conforms to the user’s edits while preserving the overall character of the original.