ABSTRACT
In order to simulate plausible groups or crowds of virtual characters, it is important to ensure that the individuals in a crowd do not look, move, behave or sound identical to each other. Such obvious 'cloning' can be disconcerting and reduce the engagement of the viewer with an animated movie, virtual environment or game. In this paper, we focus in particular on the problem of motion cloning, i. e., where the motion from one person is used to animate more than one virtual character model. Using our database of motions captured from 83 actors (45M and 38F), we present an experimental framework for evaluating human motion, which allows both the static (e.g., skeletal structure) and dynamic aspects (e.g., walking style) of an animation to be controlled. This framework enables the creation of crowd scenarios using captured human motions, thereby generating simulations similar to those found in commercial games and movies, while allowing full control over the parameters that affect the perceived variety of the individual motions in a crowd. We use the framework to perform an experiment on the perception of characteristic walking motions in a crowd, and conclude that the minimum number of individual motions needed for a crowd to look varied could be as low as three. While the focus of this paper was on the dynamic aspects of animation, our framework is general enough to be used to explore a much wider range of factors that affect the perception of characteristic human motion.
- Barclay, C. D., Cutting, J. E., and Kozlowski, L. T. 1978. Temporal and spatial factors in gait perception that influence gender recognition. Perception And Psychophysics 23, 2, 145--152.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cutting, J. E., and Kozlowski, L. T. 1977. Recognizing friends by their walk: Gait perception without familiarity cues. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 9, 5, 353--356.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dittrich, W. H., Troscianko, T., Lea, S. E., and Morgan, D., 1996. Perception of emotion from dynamic point-light displays represented in dance.Google Scholar
- Dittrich, W. H. 1993. Action categories and the perception of biological motion. Perception 22, 1, 15--22.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Hodgins, J. K., O'Brien, J. F., and Tumblin, J. 1998. Perception of human motion with different geometric models. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 4, 4, 307--316. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Johansson, G. 1973. Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis. Perception And Psychophysics 14, 2, 201--211.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kovar, L., Gleicher, M., and Pighin, F. 2002. Motion graphs. ACM Transactions on Graphics 21, 3. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kovar, L., Schreiner, J., and Gleicher, M. 2002. Foot-skate cleanup for motion capture editing. Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGGRAPH Eurographics symposium on Computer animation SCA 02, i, 97. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kozlowski, L. T., and Cutting, J. E. 1977. Recognizing the sex of a walker from a dynamic point-light display. Perception & Psychophysics 21, 6, 575--580.Google ScholarCross Ref
- McDonnell, R., Jörg, S., Hodgins, J. K., Newell, F., and O'Sullivan, C. 2007. Virtual shapers & movers: form and motion affect sex perception. Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization Vol 253. Google ScholarDigital Library
- McDonnell, R., Larkin, M., Dobbyn, S., Collins, S., and O'Sullivan, C. 2008. Clone attack! Perception of crowd variety. ACM Transactions on Graphics 27, 3, 1. Google ScholarDigital Library
- McDonnell, R., Jörg, S., Hodgins, J. K., and Newell, F. N. 2009. Evaluating the effect of motion and body shape on the perceived sex of virtual characters. ACM Transactions on Applied Perception 5, 4, 1--14. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Troje, N. F. 2002. Decomposing biological motion: A framework for analysis and synthesis of human gait. Journal of Vision 2, 10, 371--387.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Perceiving human motion variety
Recommendations
Interactive manipulation of large-scale crowd animation
Editing large-scale crowd animation is a daunting task due to the lack of an efficient manipulation method. This paper presents a novel cage-based editing method for large-scale crowd animation. The cage encloses animated characters and supports ...
Simulating gaze attention behaviors for crowds
CASA' 2009 Special IssueCrowd animation is a topic of high interest which offers many challenges. One of the most important is the trade-off between rich, realistic behaviors, and computational costs. To this end, much effort has been put into creating variety in character ...
Swoop: Animating Characters Along a Path
SIGGRAPH '23: ACM SIGGRAPH 2023 TalksSwoop is an in-house Disney tool that allows artists to easily animate motion along a trajectory. It provides an intuitive interface for users to author and edit a Swoop curve, bind one or more objects to that Swoop curve, and easily animate the timing,...
Comments