Many virtual environments and games must be populated with synthetic characters to create the desired experience. These characters must move with sufficient realism, so as not to destroy the visual quality of the experience, yet be responsive, controllable, and efficient to simulate. In this paper we present an approach to character motion called Snap-Together Motion that addresses the unique demands of virtual environments. Snap-Together Motion (STM) preprocesses a corpus of motion capture examples into a set of short clips that can be concatenated to make continuous streams of motion. The result process is a simple graph structure that facilitates efficient planning of character motions. A user-guided process selects “common” character poses and the system automatically synthesizes multi-way transitions that connect through these poses. In this manner well-connected graphs can be constructed to suit a particular application, allowing for practical interactive control without the effort of manually specifying all transitions.

@InProceedings{GSKJ03a,
  author       = "Gleicher, Michael and Shin, Hyun Joon and Kovar, Lucas and Jepsen, Andrew",
  title        = "Snap Together Motion: Assembling Run-Time Animation",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of the Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics",
  month        = "apr",
  year         = "2003",
  url          = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2003/GSKJ03a"
}