Staggered Poses: A Character Motion Representation for Detail-Preserving Editing of Pose and Coordinated Timing

Abstract

We introduce staggered poses - a representation of character motion that explicitly encodes coordinated timing among movement features in different parts of a character's body. This representation allows us to provide sparse, pose-based controls for editing motion that preserve existing movement detail, and we describe how to edit coordinated timing among extrema in these controls for stylistic editing. The staggered pose representation supports the editing of new motion by generalizing keyframe-based workflows to retain high-level control after local timing and transition splines have been created. For densely-sampled motion such as motion capture data, we present an algorithm that creates a staggered pose representation by locating coordinated movement features and modeling motion detail using splines and displacement maps. These techniques, taken together, enable feature-based keyframe editing of dense motion data.