Creature Teacher: A Performance-Based Animation System for Creating Cyclic Movements

We present Creature Teacher, a performance-based animation system for creating cyclic movements. Users directly manipulate body parts of a virtual character by using their hands. Creature Teacher's generic approach makes it possible to animate rigged 3D models with nearly arbitrary topology (e.g., non-humanoid) without requiring specialized user-to-character mappings or predefined movements. We use a bimanual interaction paradigm, allowing users to select parts of the model with one hand and manipulate them with the other hand. Cyclic movements of body parts during manipulation are detected and repeatedly played back - also while animating other body parts. Our approach of taking cyclic movements as an input makes mode switching between recording and playback obsolete and allows for fast and seamless creation of animations. We show that novice users with no animation background were able to create expressive cyclic animations for initially static virtual 3D creatures.

@inproceedings{10.1145/2788940.2788944,
 author = {Fender, Andreas and M"{u}ller, J"{o}rg and Lindlbauer, David},
 title = {Creature Teacher: A Performance-Based Animation System for Creating Cyclic Movements},
 year = {2015},
 isbn = {9781450337038},
 publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2788940.2788944},
 doi = {10.1145/2788940.2788944},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction},
 pages = {113–122},
 numpages = {10},
 keywords = {animation, performance-based, 3d user interface, 3d interaction and graphics, virtual reality},
 location = {Los Angeles, California, USA},
 series = {SUI '15}
 }