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AER: aesthetic exploration and refinement for expressive character animation

Published: 29 July 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Our progress in the problem of making animated characters move expressively has been slow, and it persists in being among the most challenging in computer graphics. Simply attending to the low-level motion control problem, particularly for physically based models, is very difficult. Providing an animator with the tools to imbue character motion with broad expressive qualities is even more ambitious, but it is clear it is a goal to which we must aspire. Part of the problem is simply finding the right language in which to express qualities of motion. Another important issue is that expressive animation often involves many disparate parts of the body, which thwarts bottom-up controller synthesis. We demonstrate progress in this direction through the specification of directed, expressive animation over a limited range of standing movements. A key contribution is that through the use of high-level concepts such as character sketches, actions and properties, which impose different modalities of character behaviour, we are able to create many different animated interpretations of the same script. These tools support both rapid exploration of the aesthetic space and detailed refinement. Basic character actions and properties are distilled from an extensive search in the performing arts literature. We demonstrate how all high-level constructions for expressive animation can be given a precise semantics that translate into a low-level motion specification that is then simulated either physically or kinematically. Our language and system can act as a bridge across artistic and technical communities to resolve ambiguities regarding the language of motion. We demonstrate our results through an implementation and various examples.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SCA '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation
      July 2005
      366 pages
      ISBN:1595931988
      DOI:10.1145/1073368
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 29 July 2005

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      SCA05: Symposium on Computer Animation
      July 29 - 31, 2005
      California, Los Angeles

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