Baroque Dance Animation with Virtual Dancers

Abstract

Our approach to computer simulation of the human movement is based on a high level description of the grammar of the movement and on the combination of basic movements acquired using motion capture systems. The combinatory techniques inspired by the ancient notation system of the Baroque Dance can lead to achieve complex tasks like synchronisation with the music tempo and rhythm in a simple way. The first phase of our project was the study of the human morphology and possible movements in the Baroque Dance, then we built an anthropomorphic 3D model which articulated structure makes it able to dance. Then we studied the major Baroque Dances, to identify their syntactic structure suitable for a hierarchical decomposition of a complete choreography. Third, we encoded the elementary movements by using a motion capture system with a professional human dancer, building two libraries of simple and complex movements, to be used for the control of the motion of the 3D articulated figure in two dinstict cases: for real-time generated dances and for rendering-based generated dances. Synchronisation with the music tempo and rhythm has also been solved, thanks to the rule that each musical measure corresponds to a complex step, or a word in our metaphor.We implemented two kind of interactive web tools to be used by the choreographer in order to define a choreography for the virtual dancer. The result is an easy to use animation system, settled as an educational application.