Coordinated Motion Planning for 3D Animation – With Use of a Chinese Lion Dance as an Example

Creating complex animations of human characters with simple high-level commands has been a design goal of animation software for a long time. Procedural animation is an effective approach in this direction aiming to create animation with algorithmic description of how a motion is generated. Nevertheless, creating coordinated motion between animated characters has always been a great challenge because of the computational complexity of the problem. In this paper, we will use Chinese lion dance as an example to develop animation procedures that can generate coordinated motions for two performing dancers moving on tops of columns arranged in various ways. The procedures use motion planning techniques to determine footstep sequences for achieving a goal configuration and adopt procedural animation methods to generate articulated motions realizing the footstep movement. Simulation examples are shown in this paper to demonstrate the effectiveness of the implemented animation system in generating realistic lion dances for a given column arrangement.