Tools for Expressive Character Animation
MICHAEL NEFF
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Thursday, May 12
1065 Kemper Hall
3:10 - 4:00 PM
Compelling characters are at the heart of most animated productions, yet it remains a significant challenge for animators to create rich, nuanced characters with unique personalities that will engage audiences. There are few tools that directly support the creation of expressive character movement -- those aspects of movement that convey personality and mood. This talk will present an extensible set of tools, and a software architecture, built to help create this type of motion. The performing arts is the domain of expertise for expressive movement. An analysis of the literature from this field was used to understand which aspects of movement are most expressively salient and a set of computational tools has been developed that allow direct control over these aspects. Key properties include variations of tension in a character's body; adjustments to balance and pose; and timing effects such as successions. A software architecture unifies these tools into a common framework and workflow. The system supports both rapid aesthetic exploration through high level interfaces such as a character sketch, and detailed refinement through access to lower level handles in explicitly represented movement properties. High-level constructions for expressive animation are given a precise semantics that translate into a low-level motion specification that is then simulated either physically or kinematically.