Rig animation with a tangible and modular input device

We developed a novel modular and tangible input device for digital character animation. It consists of joints and splitter parts. A novice user can assemble these parts into a skeleton that allows for the positioning or posing of any digital character. Our approach combines hardware with sophisticated software. An optimization algorithm suggests compact device configurations to the user. It optimizes these configurations for a specific digital character with the help of a small set of sample poses. This way, complex characters with hundreds of degrees of freedom can be animated using only 5 to 10 physical parts. Our tool interfaces with the two most popular 3D-animation tools, Autodesk Maya and Blender.

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