CHI 2018

OptiMo: Optimization-Guided Motion Editing for Keyframe Character Animation


Yuki Koyama & Masataka Goto

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)

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.

Preview Video [0:30]

Main Video [5:22]

Abstract

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.

Publication

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

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Paper (authors' preprint)

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Source codes

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High-res images & videos

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Authors

Yuki Koyama

is a Researcher at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. His main research area is Computer Graphics and Human-Computer Interaction, specializing in computational design techniques.

Masataka Goto

is a Prime Senior Researcher at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. In 2016, as the Research Director he began a 5-year research project (JST OngaACCEL Project) on music technologies.