A Framework for Natural Animation of Digitized Models

We present a novel versatile, fast and simple framework to generate highquality animations of scanned human characters from input motion data. Our method is purely mesh-based and, in contrast to skeleton-based animation, requires only a minimum of manual interaction. The only manual step that is required to create moving virtual people is the placement of a sparse set of correspondences between triangles of an input mesh and triangles of the mesh to be animated. The proposed algorithm implicitly generates realistic body deformations, and can easily transfer motions between human subjects of completely different shape and proportions. Our approach handles many different types of input data, e.g. other animated meshes and motion capture files, in just the same way. Finally, and most importantly, it creates animations at interactive frame rates. We feature two working prototype systems that demonstrate that our method can generate lifelike character animations from both marker-based and marker-less optical motion capture data.