Interactive Animating Virtual Characters with the Human Body

Abstract

This paper presents a novel interactive motion mapping system that maps the human motion to virtual characters with different body part size, topology and geometry. Our method is especially effective for characters whose body is disproportional to human structure. To achieve this, we propose an improved Embedded Deformation algorithm to control virtual characters in real-time. In preprocessing stage, we construct the deformation subgraph for each part, and then merge them into a connected deformation graph, these works are entirely automatic and only have to be done once before running. At runtime, we use the Kinect to track human skeletal joints and iteratively solve the rotation matrix and translation vector for each deformation graph node. Then, we update mesh vertices position and normal. We demonstrate the flexibility and versatility of our method on a variety of virtual characters.