Note: This isn’t a specific reading, rather a gathering of notes on things you will be reading over a period of time.
I have a bibliography of motion graphs stuff up to 2008 MotionGraphBib2008. (somewhere I have a newer version).
Overview discussion of the philosophy of example-based techniques
- 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)
Overview of the Basic Ideas in motion processing:
Sadly, the very most-basic building blocks are not well documented anywhere (and the original sources are a little hard to read). It’s probably best to look at a chapter from that never-written book. Remember, this was 2000, and I didn’t understand Quaternions at all. Also, spacetime constraints were my thing at the time (skip that section). In fact, just give it a quick skim to get a sense of what’s there. And ignore my discussion of quaternions (you’ve already learned about rotations).
- Techniques for Motion Editing pages 1-54 by Mike Gleicher, for an unfinished book. Section 1.6 is really the important part. The sections before that might help provide context.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/777-s2006/MocapBook/02-Editing.pdf
The “original” sources where these ideas were introduced
- Motion Signal Processing
by Armin Brudelin and Lance Williams, SIGGRAPH ’95 - Motion Warping
by Zoran Popovic and Andrew Witkin, SIGGRAPH ’95
Two historically significant systems that used blending techniques before they were really made widely known.
- Real Time Responsive Animation with Personality
by Ken Perlin, IEEE TVCG (Trans on Visualization and Comp Graphics), 1995 (Vol 1, Issue 1) - Verbs and Adverbs: Multidimensional Motion Interpolation
by Charles Rose, Michael F. Cohen, and Bobby Bodenheimer, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A), September 1998.
The Mid-Level Techniques
Once you have the idea of blending and signal processing, you want to put these together to do things like motion graphs and parametric control and more complex blends.
These methods really came of age in the 2002-2004 time period. We (my students – mainly Lucas Kovar – and I) published some papers. Others were doing similar things, but I think that our way of explaining it is better.
- Motion Graphs. Lucas Kovar, Michael Gleicher, Frédéric Pighin. ACM Transcations on Graphics, Volume 21, Number 3, page 473–482 – jul 2002.
- Flexible Automatic Motion Blending with Registration Curves. Lucas Kovar, Michael Gleicher Proceedings of Computer Animation – jul 2003
- Automated Extraction and Parameterization of Motions in Large Data Sets . Lucas Kovar, Michael Gleicher. ACM Transcations on Graphics, Volume 23, Number 3, page 559–568 – aug 2004
However: rather than read Lucas’ papers, I recommend the corresponding chapters of his thesis, since they were revised from the papers for clarity.
- Automated Methods for Data-Driven Synthesis of Realistic and Controllable Human Motion. Lucas Kovar. PhD thesis from Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin – Madison – 2004
Chapter 1 (the intro) is optional, but useful to look over since it discusses notation and things like that. Chapter 4 is the Motion Graphs (paper 1), Chapter 5 is registration curves (paper 2), and Chapter 6 are about extraction and parameterization (paper 3).
Motion Graphs
The idea of concatenative synthesis (of which motion graphs are one of the simplest forms) has been around for a while. In 2002, there was an explosion of interest and several groups published papers where the graphs were built automatically. I think our paper had the easiest to understand explanation, and each of the papers were subtly different. Over time, the differences between the methods proved to be less important than their similarities (so, it’s not really worth spending time on them). If you read Lucas’ thesis, he does a bit of a comparison.
- Motion Graphs. Lucas Kovar, Michael Gleicher, Frédéric Pighin. ACM Transcations on Graphics, Volume 21, Number 3, page 473–482 – jul 2002.
- Interactive Contol of Avatars Animated With Human Motion Data by Jehee Lee et al. SIGGRAPH 2002
- Interactive Motion Generation From Examples Okan Arkan and David Forsyth, SIGGRAPH 2002
After these, there was a flurry of motion-graph related activity (that continues to this day). Some of the earlier ones are good to know about because they start to point to the bigger issues in using motion graphs. They aren’t necessarily a representative sampling of all the work that builds on motion graphs.
- Snap-Together Motion: Assembling Run-Time Animation. Michael Gleicher, Hyun Joon Shin, Lucas Kovar, Andrew Jepsen. ACM Transcations on Graphics, Volume 22, Number 3, page 702–702 – jul 2003
- Parametric Motion Graphs . Rachel Heck, Michael Gleicher Proceedings of the Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics – apr 2007
I could keep going, but the best thing is probably refer to my annotated bibliography MotionGraphBib2008, or one of the survey papers.
