Research Article
Virtual Character Animations from Human Body Motion by Automatic Direct and Inverse Kinematics-based Mapping
@ARTICLE{10.4108/ct.2.2.e6, author={Andrea Sanna and Fabrizio Lamberti and Gianluca Paravati and Gilles Carlevaris and Paolo Montuschi}, title={Virtual Character Animations from Human Body Motion by Automatic Direct and Inverse Kinematics-based Mapping}, journal={EAI Endorsed Transactions on Creative Technologies}, volume={2}, number={2}, publisher={ICST}, journal_a={CT}, year={2015}, month={2}, keywords={virtual character animation, automatic armature mapping, motion capture, graph similarity, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics}, doi={10.4108/ct.2.2.e6} }- Andrea Sanna
Fabrizio Lamberti
Gianluca Paravati
Gilles Carlevaris
Paolo Montuschi
Year: 2015
Virtual Character Animations from Human Body Motion by Automatic Direct and Inverse Kinematics-based Mapping
CT
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/ct.2.2.e6
Abstract
Motion capture systems provide an efficient and interactive solution for extracting information related to a human skeleton, which is often exploited to animate virtual characters. When the character cannot be assimilated to an anthropometric shape, the task to map motion capture data onto the armature to be animated could be extremely challenging. This paper presents two methodologies for the automatic mapping of a human skeleton onto virtual character armatures. Kinematics chains of the human skeleton are analyzed in order to map joints, bones and end-effectors onto an arbitrary shaped armatures. Both forward and inverse kinematics are considered. A prototype implementation has been developed by using the Microsoft Kinect as body tracking device. Results show that the proposed solution can already be used to animate truly different characters ranging from a Pixar-like lamp to different kinds of animals.
Copyright © 2015 Andrea Sanna et al., licensed to ICST. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited.