Quick transitions with cached multi-way blends

We describe a discriminative method for distinguishing natural-looking from unnatural-looking motion. Our method is based on physical and data-driven features of motion to which humans seem sensitive. We demonstrate that our technique is significantly more accurate than current alternatives. We use this technique as the testing part of a hypothesize-and-test motion synthesis procedure. The mechanism we build using this procedure can quickly provide an application with a transition of user-specified duration from any frame in a motion collection to any other frame in the collection. During pre-processing, we search all possible 2-, 3-, and 4-way blends between representative samples of motion obtained using clustering. The blends are automatically evaluated, and the recipe (i.e., the representatives and the set of weighting functions) that created the best blend is cached. At run-time, we build a transition between motions by matching a future window of the source motion to a representative, matching the past of the target motion to a representative, and then applying the blend recipe recovered from the cache to source and target motion. People seem sensitive to poor contact with the environment like sliding foot plants. We determine appropriate temporal and positional constraints for each foot plant using a novel technique, then apply an off-the-shelf inverse kinematics technique to enforce the constraints. This synthesis procedure yields good-looking transitions between distinct motions with very low online cost.