We present OptiMo, an optimization-guided motion editing system for creating 3D character animations. By using OptiMo, animators can effectively utilize the power of numerical optimization while keeping appropriate control.
The mission of animators is to create nuanced, high-quality character motions. To achieve this, the careful editing of animation curves---curves that determine how a series of keyframed poses are interpolated over time---is an important task. Manual editing affords full and precise control, but requires tedious and nonintuitive trials and errors. Numerical optimization can automate such exploration; however, automatic solutions cannot always be perfect, and it is difficult for animators to control optimization owing to its black-box behavior. In this paper, we present a new framework called optimization-guided motion editing, which is aimed at maintaining a sense of full control while utilizing the power of optimization. We have designed interactions and developed a set of mathematical formulations to enable them. We discuss the framework's potential by demonstrating several usage scenarios with our proof-of-concept system, named OptiMo.
Yuki Koyama and Masataka Goto. 2018. OptiMo: Optimization-Guided Motion Editing for Keyframe Character Animation. In Proceedings of 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18), pp.161:1--161:12.
DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173735