Automatic Splicing for Hand and Body Animations

Abstract

We propose a solution to a new problem in animation research: how to use human motion capture data to create character motion with detailed hand gesticulation without the need for the simultaneous capture of hands and the full-body. Occlusion and a difference in scale make it difficult to capture both the detail of the hand movement and unrestricted full-body motion at the same time. With our method, the two can be captured separately and spliced together seamlessly with little or no user input required. The algorithm relies on a novel distance metric derived from research on gestures and uses a two-pass dynamic time warping algorithm to find correspondence between the hand and full-body motions. In addition, we provide a method for supplying user input, useful to animators who want more control over the integrated animation. We show the power of our technique with a variety of common and highly specialized gesticulation examples.