Animation links

• CharacterAnimationHome
• CAProjectIdeas
• CharacterAnimationGroup

Teaching links

• TeachingTips

Various Project Ideas

• In-depth study of motion alignment
  • It seems like distance-based motion alignment is a difficult problem: a punch to the left and a punch to the right will almost necessarily not get aligned right. A good alignment would aligh the extremas of these punches, but this is the "worst case" for a distance-based technique.
  • Investigate how other techniques behave: aligning velocities, accelerations, blending-based alignment.
  • Blending-based alignment: find an alignment so that for any blending ratio, the blended motion introduces/destroy as few frequency components as possible.
  • Blending-based alignment can probably be casted entirely in the frequency domain, an interesting theoretical project.
  • Thoroughly study n-way alignment
  • Build parameterized blend spaces
  • Perform a user-study to evaluate the quality of the resulting motion
  • Study the effect of modifying the blending parameter during the motion
  • Evaluate the physical correctness of the various approach, or with an evolving blending parameter
• Motion synthesis in wavelet space
  • When compressing, study if similar motions have a similar optimal truncated wavelet coefficient distribution.
  • If so, then use this fact (together with PCA?) to reduce the search space for various kinematic motion synthesis.
• Throwing and catching
  • Acquire mocap data for a character catching an object (a ball?)
  • Parameterize on:
    • Catching location
    • Object speed and mass
  • Kinematically synthesize a novel motion given arbitrary parameters
• Efficient real-time exploration of a distant motion-capture database
  • Motions are transmitted across a slow channel (ie. the internet)
  • Simultaneously display a bunch of huge bunch of animations (on the same ground plane, with a wide perspective view)
  • Use wavelet-based progressive motion compression to obtain adaptive level-of-detail
    • Motion far from the viewer is less detailed
    • Automatic and nice degradation when transmission slows down
  • Use streaming transmission
  • Spatially regroup animations according to similarity
  • Automatixally extract a motion hierarchy based on similarity
    • Display a sample motion for a a complete group of similar motion that can later be "opened up"
• Compression related projects
  • Develop and study more involved spatial compressions
    • PCA across the DOFs with pre- or post-wavelet compression (useful for large database compression)
    • Use automatic motion segmentation (Barbic et al. 2004) and pre-canned linear spaces adapted to the extracted clip
    • Dictionnary-based methods for large database (problem: building an efficient dictionnary of motion clips)
  • Study the importance of various errors in human perception of skeletal animations
  • Apply compression to complex animation data structures
    • Motion Graphs
    • Specialized database for synthesis of a specific kind of motion
  • Constaint enforcement during compression
    • Constrain extremal poses and derivatives (for inclusion in a "snap-together" style of motion graph, or for cycling motions)
    • 2-person interaction (dancing...) where animations constrain each other.
  • Efficient motion blending using a wavelet basis
  • Develop and study prediction-correction schemes (similar to MPEG motion compensation)
  • Build and use statistical motion models to increase compression efficiency
    • The model could be for a complete skeleton or part of a skeleton
    • The model could be specific (extracted from a small bank of similar motions) or generic (extracted from a large motion database)
    • The model could be for really short motion segments or for complete clips
    • Better yet, it could be multi-resolution: long clips for wide basis functions and short clips for narrow basis functions.

Random thoughts

• Definition of "action", "motion" and "state" in a dynamical-system vocabulary
  • An active dynamical system D is a triplet (S,M,A) that contains a set of states, motions and actions. (none of these needs to be finite)
  • A motion m:S->S is a function of the state space into itself. This means that, given any specific motion from M, a state s can only be mapped towards a single other state s'. In other words, under a fixed motion, trajectory lines cannot cross.
  • An action a:M->M is a function of the motion space into itself. In other words, if we notice trajectory line that crosses, it means an action has been applied.
  • A projection of D towards D' = (S',M',A') is a transformation T:S->S' of the state space such that S' is of lower dimensionality than S. Moreover, for any m in M there exist m' in M' such that m (s) = s' <==> m' (T(s)) = T(s'). Similarly for the actions.
  • In other words, a projection reduces the dimensionality of the state space, but does not introduce crossings in the trajectories for any motion.
  • A reduced dynamical system D is such that it cannot be projected in any way.

Personal Interests (beside CG)

• VancouverRestaurants
• My blog about boardgames (in french)

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-- PhilippeBeaudoin - 04 Feb 2009