High Level Motion Authoring for Articulated Figures

Michael Wasserman & Michael Ilardi http://www.columbia.edu/~msw2103/cs4167/

Concept

What if you could just tell your articulated figure to walk or wave its hand?

Using a timeline interface, an artist could “paint” animations onto an articulated figure.

Using Maya this could be rendered as a 3D animation for some given hierarchical bone structure.

Demo

Using these simple commands:– takepose posename rootofpose– (Timeline editing)– takeplist plistname

Produce this animation:– (Play clips)

Tools

Maya – Professional level modeling and animation software MEL – Maya’s Embedded (scripting) Language Maya API – Application Programming Interface (C++, plug-ins) Our tools

– Skeleton and Skin – Gimbal rotations, root translations, and subd.– Setpose – A plug-in used to record information about the state of

the articulated figure to a .pose file– Timeline – Graphical interface for creating .plist and .anim files

from .pose and .anim files (hierarchical, open, manipulate, save, export)

– Takeplist – A plug-in to apply a .plist scene to the articulated figure

Whodunit?

Mike Wasserman Mike Ilardi

Timeline XXX

Setpose X

Takeplist X

Articulated Figure X X

Figure Skin X

Animation X X

Conclusion

Both of us realized that tackling the intricacies of Maya’s scripting language, API, and the plethora of data structures required to administrate an animation (and give it a graphic interface) was a much larger project than originally thought.

As such, we were compelled to use Maya’s internal interpolation algorithms, not our own.

IK vs. FK tradeoffs