Amazingly, I am not aware of any good, basic readings on motion capture. I don’t know where people are supposed to get the basics from. About 14 years ago, I was working with some people on a book, but it never came together. But I am not aware of too much else.
What I would like you to do for Wednesday, 2/20: Read (at least) one of the “Animation from Observation” articles (list below) I wrote in 1999. These will give you a dose of mocap philosophy and get you thinking about the problems. Then read the “More Motion Capture” paper, since it will give you an idea of where the methods we’ll discuss next week.
These are light readings (no equations) – maybe a little long winded (I can say that, since I wrote them), so they shouldn’t get in the way of your movie making efforts too much.]
And then, one more: I want you to skim over one of the survey papers on motion synthesis methods. Just to get an idea of the kinds of topics they cover. You’ll actuall have to read one for next week.
Both of these are old, and obviously dated. So for the question to answer on Moodle, I’ll ask you to think about what you think may be out of date in these readings, and what you think is still true.
The readings:
Here are two old things (written 2000 or before) – its interesting to think about what has (and hasn’t). And since these viewpoints are (were?) mine, you can see how far we’ve come. For historical context: when these were written, motion graphs hadn’t been invented (although their pre-cursors were already in use in the games industry). No one had published (or demonstrated) using machine learning for mocap-based animation. Almost everybody I knew still used Euler angles.
- Animation from Observation
Chapter 1 of a not yet written book by Mike Gleicher
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/777-s2006/MocapBook/01-Intro.pdf - Animation from Observation by Michael Gleicher in Computer Graphics 33(4), p51-54. Special Issue on Applications of Computer Vision to Computer Graphics.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Papers/Gleicher/Mocap/anim-obs-article.pdf
Another “philosophy” paper I wrote much later. This focuses more on creating new motions from motion data, and the kinds of methods we’ll learn about next week.
- More Motion Capture in Games: Can We Make Example-Based Approaches Scale? by Michael Gleicher, Motion in Games, 2008. http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2008/Gle08/(pdf here)
Surveys of example-based synthesis techniques (relatively recent):
These surveys really quickly describe a lot of what has been done in research. They are useful to give you a sense of what’s out there.
- VAN WELBERGEN H., VAN BASTEN B. J. H., EGGES A., RUTTKAY Z. M., OVERMARS M. H.: Real time animation of virtual humans: A trade-off between naturalness and control. Computer Graphics Forum 29, 8 (2010), 2530–2554. http://people.cs.uu.nl/basten/publication/CGF2010.pdf (local version)
- T. Pejsa, I.S. Pandzic. State of the Art in Example-Based Motion Synthesis for Virtual Characters in Interactive Applications. Computer Graphics Forum Volume 29, Issue 1, pages 202–226, March 2010. (local version)
