Motion Transfer and Metamorphosis for 3D Animated Models

Animation has been manipulated widely in movies and video games nowadays.
To make a 3D model move, traditionally, requires animators’ efforts to edit the
key poses of the model. It is a time-consuming task, especially when dealing with
an imposing scene such as those full of different animals or soldiers.
In this thesis, we proposed an improved method in transferring skeleton-driven
motions from one model to another. To transfer the motions of the source model
to the target one, we need to construct animation data for the target model
which has only mesh information. Such animation data we deal with are the
skeleton, binding-weight, and key-frames poses information. The basic idea of
our system is utilizing the surface parameterization to get a bijective mapping
between the surfaces of two models. And by recording the animation data from
the source model as the attributes of the vertices, we can transfer the motions
from the source model to the target one. Using the surface mapping information,
we also can also do morphing effect which can transform the source shape into the
target shape. Combining the mesh morphing techniques and the motion transition
techniques, animated morphing sequences are generated which morph the shape
and the motion simultaneously and smoothly between two models.
The skeleton and binding weight can be transferred in our system instead of
spending lots of time in creating them by some author tools. The animation
sequence can be reused and it is useful when dealing with the scenes which are
filled with background crowds with almost similar motions. Moreover animated
morphing technique is not only a special effect but also can help us to create some
new models which are blended by several existing animated models.