Puppetry : An Importance-Based Approach To appear in ACM Transactions on Graphics journal

Computer puppetry maps the movements of a performer to an animated character in real time. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive solution to the problem of transferring the observations of the motion capture sensors to an animated character whose size and proportion may be different than the performer. Our goal is to map as much of the important aspects of the motion to the target character as possible, while meeting the on-line, real-time demands of computer puppetry. We adopt a Kalman filter scheme that addresses motion capture noise issues in this 1 setting. We provide the notion of dynamic importance of an end-effector that allows us to determine what aspects of the performance must be kept in the resulting motion. We introduce a novel inverse kinematics solver that realizes these important aspects within tight real-time constraints. Our approach is demonstrated by its application to broadcast television performances.

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