The chimaera project: an online database of animal motions

Digital animators will save vast amounts of project time by starting with a completed skeleton and some base animations. This result can be accomplished with Web 2.0 technologies by creating a repository of skeletons and animations that any animator may use for free. While free Maya™ skeletons currently exist on the Internet, the websites housing them have only brief features and functions for browsing and interacting with these files. None of these websites contain downloadable animations for the provided skeletons. The Chimaera Project improves the field of Web 2.0 sites offering free rigs by offering many new features and freedoms to the animation community. Users may upload and download Maya™ skeletons, share comments and tips with each other, upload animations associated with the skeletons, and search or browse the skeletons in a variety of ways. The skeletons include descriptions and information provided by the creator and are categorized by class, order, and species. Users may access a freely provided script called “zooXferAnim” to import and export animations into text files to be uploaded and downloaded on the website. Many animations per skeleton may be uploaded. The Chimaera Project extends the Web 2.0 community by creating an interactive resource for animators to contribute and share content in a better, more organized format than previously seen on the Internet

Interactive visual method for motion and model reuse

We consider a repository of animation models and motions that can be reused to generate new animation sequences. For instance, a user can retrieve an animation of a dog kicking its leg (in air) and manipulate the result to generate a new animation where the dog is kicking a ball. In this particular example, inverse kinematics technique can be used to retarget the kicking motion of a dog to a ball. This approach of reusing models and motions to generate new animation sequences can be facilitated by operations such as querying of animation databases for required models and motions, and manipulation of the query results to meet new constraints. However, manipulation operations such as motion retargeting are quite complex in nature. Hence, there is a need for visualizing the queries on animation databases as well as the manipulation operations on the query results.In this paper, we propose a visually interactive method for reusing motions and models, by adjusting the query results from animation databases for new situations while at the same time, keeping the desired properties of the original models and motions. Here, a user first queries for animation objects, i.e., geometric models and motions. Then, the user interactively makes new animations by visually manipulating the query results. Depending on the orders in which the GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) are invoked and the parameters are changed, the system automatically generates a sequence of operations, a list of SQL-like syntax commands, and applies it to the query results of motions and models. With the help of visualization tools, the user can view the changes before accepting them. Copyright © 2003 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

Interactive visual method for motion and model reuse

10.1145/604471.604479Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Australasia and South East Asia, GRAPHITE '0329-36+29