Title: Character Animation: A View-Dependent Approach
Speaker: Dr. Parag Chaudhuri
Date: September 15, 2008
Abstract:
The concept of "staging" is one of the most fundamental principles of character animation. The principle, derived from accumulated wisdom acquired over decades of theatrical plays and cinematography, dictates that a character's action should always be to the camera, so that the intent of the action is clear to the audience. The principle is especially hard to apply to animations where the camera is also moving. In this talk, we present the concept of View-Dependent Character Animation that formalizes the relationship between camera and character movement using an abstract theoretical representation called the view space.
Then we discuss the algorithms we have developed to populate and realize this abstract view space in practice, by using inputs from multimodal data sources like sketches, videos and motion capture. Real-time, interactive character animation imposes strict practical time bounds on the response time of the developed algorithms, so we analyze how changing some of the underlying mathematical representations and interpolation techniques help make the animation real-time.
Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion on applications of View-Dependent Animation to Virtual and Mixed Realities, and stylized animation synthesis.
About the Speaker:
Parag Chaudhuri did his BE from Delhi College of Engg. and his PhD from IIT Delhi. Currently, he is a post-doc at MIRALab, university of Geneva, Switzerland.