CP SC 881.005: Technical Foundations of Character Animation

Character Animation Teaser

Course Overview

INSTRUCTOR: Sophie Joerg
OFFICE HOURS: By appointment, McAdams 318
SEMESTER: Spring 2013
TIME: MWF 1:25-2:15
LOCATION: McAdams 123/133

Syllabus

Class Schedule

Past and Current

Week Topic Reading (⇒ means that this paper is required reading for everyone)
01/07/13 Introduction -
01/14/13Motion Editing ⇒ Andrew Witkin and Zoran Popović. 1995. Motion Warping. SIGGRAPH 95.
Armin Bruderlin and Lance Williams. 1995. Motion signal processing. SIGGRAPH 95.
01/21/133D Transformations and Quaternions Jessica Hodgins and James O'Brien. 1999. Computer Animation.
⇒ Ken Shoemake. 1985. Animating Rotation with Quaternion Curves SIGGRAPH '85.
01/28/133D Transformations and Quaternions ⇒ Rick Parent. 2012. Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques. Chapter 2.
02/04/13Inverse Kinematics ⇒ Jianmin Zhao and Norman I. Badler. 1994. Inverse Kinematics Positioning Using Nonlinear Programming for Highly Articulated Figures. ACM Transactions on Graphics.
Keith Grochow, Steven Martin, Aaron Hertzmann, and Zoran Popović. 2004. Style-based inverse kinematics. ACM Transactions on Graphics.
02/11/13Motion Capture ⇒ James F. O'Brien, Robert E. Bodenheimer, Gabriel J. Brostow, and Jessica K. Hodgins Automatic Joint Parameter Estimation from Magnetic Motion Capture Data. Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2000. To be presented by Kacey
Bobby Bodenheimer, Chuck Rose, Seth Rosenthal, and John Pella. 1997. The Process of Motion Capture: Dealing with the Data. Computer Animation and Simulation.
Michael Gleicher. 2000. Animation From Observation: Motion Capture and Motion Editing. Computer Graphics 33(4).
02/18/13Motion Graphs - Basics Charles Rose, Michael Cohen and Bobby Bodenheimer. 1998. Verbs and Adverbs: Multidimensional Motion Interpolation. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.
⇒ Lucas Kovar, Michael Gleicher, Fred Pighin. 2002. Motion Graphs. ACM Transactions on Graphics. To be presented by Lauren
Okan Arikan and David Forsyth. 2002. Interactive Motion Generation from Examples. ACM Transactions on Graphics.
02/25/13Motion Graphs - Advanced ⇒ James McCann and Nancy S. Pollard. 2007. Responsive Characters from Motion Fragments ACM Transactions on Graphics To be presented by Chris
Michael Gleicher. 2008. More Motion Capture in Games -- Can We Make Example-Based Approaches Scale? Motion in Games
Adrien Treuille, Yongjoon Lee, and Zoran Popović. 2007. Near-optimal Character Animation with Continuous Control. ACM Transactions on Graphics
03/04/13Motion Capture - Using Data ⇒ Jinxiang Chai and Jessica Hodgins. 2005. Performance Animation from Low-dimensional Control Signals. ACM Transactions on Graphics To be presented by Patrick.
Katherine Pullen and Christoph Bregler. 2002. Motion capture assisted animation: texturing and synthesis. ACM Transactions on Graphics.
Ronit Slyper and Jessica K. Hodgins. 2008. Action Capture with Accelerometers. Symposium on Computer Animation.
03/11/13Mocap and Control ⇒ Wenping Zhao, Jinxiang Chai, and Ying-Qing Xu. 2012. Combining Marker-based Mocap and RGB-D Camera for Acquiring High-quality Hand Motion Data. Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA). To be presented by Rajas.
Robert Y. Wang and Jovan Popović. 2009. Real-Time Hand-Tracking with a Color Glove. ACM Transaction on Graphics.
David J. Sturman and David Zeltzer. 1993. A Design Method for "Whole-Hand" Human-Computer Interaction. ACM Transactions on Information Systems.
03/25/13Gestures and Hands ⇒ Sophie Jörg, Jessica Hodgins, and Alla Safonova. 2012. Data-driven Finger Motion Synthesis for Gesturing Characters. ACM Transactions on Graphics.
Chris Kang, Nkenge Wheatland, Michael Neff, and Victor Zordan. 2012. Automatic Hand-Over Animation for Free-Hand Motions from Low Resolution Input. Motion In Games (MIG). To be presented by Ben.
Michael Neff and Hans-Peter Seidel. 2006. Modeling Relaxed Hand Shape for Character Animation. Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects (AMDO).
04/01/13Perception ⇒ Rachel McDonnell, Martin Breidt, and Heinrich Buelthoff. 2012. Render me Real? Investigating the Effect of Render Style on the Perception of Animated Virtual Humans ACM Transactions on Graphics. (also watch the source material) To be presented by Karen.
Masahiro Mori. 1970. Bukimi no tani. The uncanny valley (translated by K. F. MacDorman & T. Minato, Originally in Japanese), Energy.
Martin Pražák, Ludovic Hoyet and Carol O'Sullivan. 2011. Perceptual Evaluation of Footskate Cleanup. SCA.

Future (subject to change)

Week Topic Reading
04/08/13Faces and Eyes ⇒ Sooha Park Lee, Jeremy Badler, and Norman Badler. 2002. Eyes alive. TOG.
Sang Hoon Yeo, Martin Lesmana, Debanga R. Neog, and Dinesh K. Pai. 2012. Eyecatch: Simulating Visuomotor Coordination for Object Interception. TOG.
04/15/13 Revision and Exam

Further possible topics: Interpolation, Rigging/Skinning, Locomotion, Physically based animation, Characters in Games, Embodied Conversational Agents, Crowds...

Further material

Motion Editing

Videos from the Motion Warping paper
Materials from the SIGGRAPH '00 course Motion Editing: Principles Practice and Promise
Pavel Senin. 2008. Dynamic Time Warping Algorithm Review. Technical Report.
Examples of motion editing papers using time warping:
Anna Majkowska, Victor Zordan, and Petros Faloutsos. Automatic Splicing for Hand and Body Animations. SCA '06.
Rachel Heck, Lucas Kovar, and Michael Gleicher. Splicing Upper-Body Actions with Locomotion Proceedings of Eurographics 2006.
Eugene Hsu, Marco da Silva, Jovan Popovic. Guided Time Warping for Motion Editing. SCA 2007.
Maya Time Warping Tutorial

Unity

Documentation
Scripting Reference
Scripting Tutorial
Mecanim Tutorial, better Link on Youtube,
Characters, Assets

Motion Capture

Adam G. Kirk, James F. O'Brien, and David A. Forsyth. 2005. Skeletal Parameter Estimation from Optical Motion Capture Data
Takaaki Shiratori, Hyun Soo Park, Leonid Sigal, Yaser Sheikh, Jessica K. Hodgins. 2011. Motion Capture from Body-Mounted Cameras

Motion Graphs

Jehee Lee, Jinxiang Chai, Paul S. A. Reitsma, Jessica K. Hodgins, and Nancy S. Pollard. 2002. Interactive Control of Avatars Animated with Human Motion Data
Alla Safonova and Jessica K. Hodgins. 2007. Construction and optimal search of interpolated motion graphs

Splicing

Leslie Ikemoto and David Forsyth. 2004. Enriching a Motion Collection by Transplanting Limbs. SCA.
Rachel Heck, Lucas Kovar, and Michael Gleicher. 2006. Splicing Upper-Body Actions with Locomotion. Eurographics.

Motion Capture - Using Data

Liu Ren, Gregory Shakhnarovich, Jessica Hodgins, Hanspeter Pfister and Paul Viola. 2005. Learning Silhouette Features for Control of Human Motion. ACM Transactions on Graphics.

Databases

Mubbasir Kapadia, I-kao Chiang, Tiju Thomas, Norman I. Badler, and Joseph T. Kider Jt. 2013. Efficient Motion Retrieval in Large Motion Databases. I3D.
Okan Arikan. 2006. Compression of Motion Capture Databases. ACM Transactions on Graphics.
Jernej Barbič, Alla Safonova, Jia-Yun Pan, Christos Faloutsos, Jessica K. Hodgins and N. S. Pollard. 2004. Segmenting Motion Capture Data into Distinct Behaviors. Graphics Interface.

Evaluation

Paul Reitsma and Nancy Pollard, 2004. Evaluating Motion Graphs for Character Navigation. SCA.

Control

Joseph Laszlo, Michiel van de Panne, and Eugene Fiume. 2000. Interactive Control For Physically-Based Animation. SIGGRAPH Wai-Chun Lam, Feng Zou, and Taku Komura. 2004. Motion editing with data glove. ACE
KangKang Yin and Dinesh K. Pai. 2003. FootSee: an Interactive Animation System. SCA. Naoki Numaguchi, Atsushi Nakazawa, Takaaki Shiratori, and Jessica K. Hodgins. 2011. A Puppet Interface for Retrieval of Motion Capture Data. SCA.

Gestures and Hands

Yuting Ye and C. Karen Liu. 2012. Synthesis of Detailed Hand Manipulations Using Contact Sampling
George ElKoura and Karan Singh. 2003. Handrix: Animating the Human Hand. SCA.
Nancy Pollard and Victor Zordan. 2005. Physically Based Grasping Control from Example. SCA.
Justine Cassell, Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson, Timothy Bickmore. 2001. Beat: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001.
Sergey Levine, Philipp Krähenbühl, Sebastian Thrun, Vladlen Koltun. 2010. Gesture Controllers. ACM Transactions on Graphics.

Perception

Johansson: Motion Perception part 1, part 2
BioMotionLab
Heider and Simmel stimuli
J.M. Kilner, Y. Paulignan, and S.J. Blakemore. 2003. An Interference Effect of Observed Biological Movement on Action. Current Biology.