A Dynamics-based Comparison Metric for Motion Graphs

Abstract

Motion graph approaches focus on the re-use of character animation contained in a motion-capture repository by connecting similar frames in the database with transitions. Because the output animation of a motion graph comes directly from the motion capture data except for the transitions, the quality of the motion depends largely on the transition points selected. In this paper, we investigate comparison metrics for choosing transition points, aiming at improving the visual quality of animations generated using motion graphs. Specifically, we focus on the weight assigned to each body part, which reflects the relative significance of the body part on the quality of the generated motion. We introduce a novel weighting scheme, based on an estimation of the character’s dynamics, which assigns weights for each body according to displaced mass and simplified friction terms. To assess the quality of the transitions selected by our proposed dynamic metric, we compare its results to previous methods, looking at both visual quality and quantitative analysis