Motion transfer between digital creatures for computer animation

This paper proposes a motion transfer method for multi-legged digital creatures and a motion generation method for redundant joints. It is very difficult to capture the movement of creatures (animals). That is because creatures are hard to treat and the size of a creature is often too big or small. Usually animators manually create motions of creatures in the CG industry. A motion transfer method is proposed in order to overcome the above-mentioned difficulties in capturing creaturepsilas motions. The proposed method consists of two stages. In the first stage, the root (user-specified center joint of the bone structure) joint motion is copied, and other limbs movements are copied by using the inverse kinematics method in the next stage. When the target creaturepsilas bone structure is more complicated than that of the source creature, there may be redundant joints of the target creature that do not have appropriate matching source joints. A method for creating motions of the redundant joints is also proposed.