VidAnimator: User-Guided Stylized 3D Character Animation from Human Videos

TL;DR

VidAnimator is a user-guided system that converts human videos into stylized 3D character animations, significantly simplifying the animation process with interactive tools and customizable options.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-initiative framework and interactive tools for transferring motion from videos to stylized 3D characters, enabling intuitive customization.

Findings

The system produces natural stylized animations similar to input videos.

User studies confirm the effectiveness of the framework.

Case studies demonstrate diverse animation results.

Abstract

With captivating visual effects, stylized 3D character animation has gained widespread use in cinematic production, advertising, social media, and the potential development of virtual reality (VR) non-player characters (NPCs). However, animating stylized 3D characters often requires significant time and effort from animators. We propose a mixed-initiative framework and interactive system to enable stylized 3D characters to mimic motion in human videos. The framework takes a single-view human video and a stylized 3D character (the target character) as input, captures the motion of the video, and then transfers the motion to the target character. In addition, it involves two interaction modules for customizing the result. Accordingly, the system incorporates two authoring tools that empower users with intuitive modification. A questionnaire study offers tangible evidence of the framework's capability of generating natural stylized 3D character animations similar to the motion in the video. Additionally, three case studies demonstrate the utility of our approach in creating diverse results.