Fast, automatic character animation pipelines

Humanoid three-dimensional (3D) models can be easily acquired through various sources, including through online marketplaces. The use of such models within a game or simulation environment requires human input and intervention in order to associate such a model with a relevant set of motions and control mechanisms. In this paper, we demonstrate a pipeline where humanoid 3D models can be incorporated within seconds into an animation system and infused with a wide range of capabilities, such as locomotion, object manipulation, gazing, speech synthesis and lip syncing. We offer a set of heuristics that can associate arbitrary joint names with canonical ones and describe a fast retargeting algorithm that enables us to instill a set of behaviors onto an arbitrary humanoid skeleton on-the-fly. We believe that such a system will vastly increase the use of 3D interactive characters due to the ease that new models can be animated. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.