DualMotion: Global-to-Local Casual Motion Design for Character Animations

TL;DR

DualMotion is a sketch-based system that simplifies character animation creation by allowing users to design global and local motions through rough sketches, enhancing accessibility and creativity in 3D character animation.

Contribution

It introduces a two-stage design strategy combining global and local motion sketches, facilitating easier and more intuitive character animation creation.

Findings

User study confirms system's effectiveness and ease of use.

Supports creative animation design with minimal expertise.

Enables combining global and local motions seamlessly.

Abstract

Animating 3D characters using motion capture data requires basic expertise and manual labor. To support the creativity of animation design and make it easier for common users, we present a sketch-based interface DualMotion, with rough sketches as input for designing daily-life animations of characters, such as walking and jumping.Our approach enables to combine global motions of lower limbs and the local motion of the upper limbs in a database by utilizing a two-stage design strategy. Users are allowed to design a motion by starting with drawing a rough trajectory of a body/lower limb movement in the global design stage. The upper limb motions are then designed by drawing several more relative motion trajectories in the local design stage. We conduct a user study and verify the effectiveness and convenience of the proposed system in creative activities.