Conference Paper

Keyframe animation and motion capture for creating animation: a survey and perception from industry people

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Abstract

The history of animation is generally referred to early production of traditional animation. It has begun in the early 1900. "Animation is the essence of animation" as explained by Halas (1991). It is a series of images that appear to be in motion. It can be either traditional animation or computer animation. In addition, Greenberg (1997) explains "Animation is a deliberately interpreted "illusion of life". It has been practiced for the last 70 years in both drawn and stop motion animation, and as such, is not an attempt to mimic human and animal life exactly" Traditionally animation is produced by drawing illusion of movement created by photographing a series of individual drawings on successive frames on film. Gleicher (1999), explains "Animation is a uniquely expressive art form: it provides the creator with control over both the appearance and the movement of characters and objects. This gives artists tremendous freedom, which when well used, can create works with tremendous impact." According to the historical timeline, many forms of animation have been introduced. This includes cel animation, clay animation, stop frame animation, three dimensional (3D) computer animation and virtual reality. With the rapid growth of this industry various types of techniques, methodologies and computer technologies have been developed, for instance keyframe animation, non-linear animation, motion capture, procedural animation and etc. This research discusses about producing animation by using two methods: motion capture and keyframe animation. Throughout this, the author covers some feedback from the respondents about the priority of using these both methods. It also highlights the pros and cons of these two approaches.

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... Making 3D animation itself requires long processing and a large amount of funding. This is because most 3D animated films still use keyframing technology which causes the process to make an animation to take a lot of steps [1]. The cost of making 3D animation in a studio with the full support of animation tools costs around 3000 Euros per month depending on the duration of the tool usage and data collection. ...
... Generating animation using the motion capture method has been proposed by many researchers [1]- [9]. From the previous related research, the motion capture method of the humanoid model for sports animation movements using markerless sensors did not always produce good results. ...
... The mapping step is performed to map Kinect skeleton joints data into humanoid bones data. This mapping process will produce a motion animation of the humanoid 3D model [1]. There are 25 joints in the Kinect data while there are 52 joints in the humanoid bones model. ...
Article
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The definition of 3D animation is a representation of objects that are made into animation using characters or objects to look more alive and real. Making 3D animation itself requires a long process and a large amount of funding. This is because most 3D animated films still use key-framing technology which causes the process to make an animation to take a lot of steps. In this research, a motion capture technique with an enhancement filter is proposed to make humanoid movement animation using Kinect 2.0. The method consists of several steps such as recording every skeleton joint of human movements using a Kinect sensor, filtering the movements to minimize the shakiness and jitter from Kinect data, mapping skeleton data to the bones of a rigged humanoid model, and recording each movement to make animation. The final result is in the form of a 3D animation of modern dance movements. The method is tested by measuring the similarity between the 3D humanoid model and the user movement. From the 10 animations of modern dance generated by the method and performed by the user, a questionnaire to measure the MRI and MSE value is distributed and the result achieves 4.27 on a scale of 5 for the averaged MRI score and 0.0539 for the MSE score. The MSE value is less than 5% which means the system is categorized as acceptable.
... Referring to fig. 6 (a), the appearance of the folder before the mouse hover, (b), and the embossed appearance with the name of the folder is displayed when a mouse is hovered on top. Animation can be distracting to the users especially in the case of too much of use of it and it is said to be a unique expression of art [30], [31]. Thus, animation is practiced as a simple representation in the form of mouse hover action in this task. ...
... Thus, animation is practiced as a simple representation in the form of mouse hover action in this task. However, this animation did not contribute much to the blind user due to the reason that to interpret a continuous movement it involves the coordination of eye and brain to assemble the sequence of images and this is not possible for a blind user [31]. ...
... Keyframe animation is a cornerstone of character animation, but it provides only kinematic data, with no guarantee of dynamic feasibility [21]. To address this, we developed software integrating MuJoCo [45] with a GUI, enabling real-time tuning and validation of keyframes and motion trajectories generated through linear interpolation with user-defined timings. ...
Preprint
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... For decades, the prevailing practice for animation design has been that an expert draws only the key poses (keyframes) which are then filled in by less experienced workers, or interpolated using quaternions in the case of 3D animation [22]. To the best of our knowledge, such an approach has not been translated to 3D human motion generation in the existing arXiv:2405.15439v1 ...
Preprint
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Text-driven human motion generation is an emerging task in animation and humanoid robot design. Existing algorithms directly generate the full sequence which is computationally expensive and prone to errors as it does not pay special attention to key poses, a process that has been the cornerstone of animation for decades. We propose KeyMotion, that generates plausible human motion sequences corresponding to input text by first generating keyframes followed by in-filling. We use a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with Kullback-Leibler regularization to project the keyframes into a latent space to reduce dimensionality and further accelerate the subsequent diffusion process. For the reverse diffusion, we propose a novel Parallel Skip Transformer that performs cross-modal attention between the keyframe latents and text condition. To complete the motion sequence, we propose a text-guided Transformer designed to perform motion-in-filling, ensuring the preservation of both fidelity and adherence to the physical constraints of human motion. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-theart results on the HumanML3D dataset outperforming others on all R-precision metrics and MultiModal Distance. KeyMotion also achieves competitive performance on the KIT dataset, achieving the best results on Top3 R-precision, FID, and Diversity metrics.
... (20) A lot of information can be transferred by using moving images because the eye-brain assembles a sequence of images and interprets them as a continuous movement. (21) Children can learn more effectively by combining animation and narrative rather than just narration. (22) Furthermore, preschoolers tend to have a short interest in a subject but when they have focus, it takes less time to recognize and understand.As children's attention spans are substantially shorter than adults. ...
... Sejauh ini, metode yang digunakan untuk membuat animasi 3D yang sering dipaparkan dalam paper penelitian yang membahas animasi antara lain stop motion, motion capture, keyframe, script, cut out dan puppet [6], [25]. Penelitian ini menerapkan metode keyframe karena metode ini merupakan konsep utama dalam computer animation [6], [7]. Metode pembuatan animasi 3D keyframe dimulai dari satu point ke point lainnya hingga menjadi satu kesatuan visualisasi gambar object yang dapat diinterpretasikan sebagai cerita. ...
Article
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Animasi 3D merupakan salah satu penerapan ilmu grafika komputer. Film animasi 3D dapat digunakan sebagai media pembelajaran untuk menyampaikan pesan. Dalam perancangannya, masih banyak film animasi 3D yang menghasilkan gerakan kaku dan tidak realistis. Hal ini disebabkan karena terdapat kekurangan pada proses animating. Masalah tersebut melatarbelakangi penelitian ini. Tujuan yang ingin dicapai adalah menemukan metode yang tepat guna menghasilkan gerakan animasi yang tidak kaku sehingga dapat menyampaikan pesan dengan baik. Penelitian ini mengangkat tema islami dan kasih sayang ibu. Metode yang digunakan dalam proses animating adalah metode keyframe; metode pembuatan animasi 3D yang dimulai dari satu point ke point lainnya hingga menjadi satu kesatuan visualisasi gambar object. Perancangan animasi 3D dilakukan menggunakan software blender dan dilakukan dalam 8 tahap yaitu penentuan desain cerita, penggambaran storyboard, character modelling, texturing, rigging, animating, rendering, dan editing. Penelitian ini menghasilkan film animasi 3D yang berdurasi 90 detik dalam format mp4. Metode keyframing juga terbukti efektif dan mudah diterapkan untuk menghasilkan gerakan animasi yang halus jika interpolated value nya diperkecil.
... This is because motion capture required a lot of high technology camera and equipment such as body suits to track and record the movement of the motion [2]. Not to be forget it is also required a large space of area and specific talents for the process to take place [3]. Overall, it is really costly for researcher to prepare the motion capture's setup in order to get the realistic motion data. ...
Chapter
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Capturing traditional dance motion data using motion capture technology is too expensive as it required a lot of high-priced equipment involving complicated procedures. It is also hard to find any traditional dance motion data from any open sources as the motion data always being made private and not for public use. However, the traditional dance videos can be found easily from any internet medium such as YouTube and it also free to be used by the public. Therefore, in this paper we propose a method of extracting the 3D dance motion data of Zapin traditional dance from videos instead of motion capture technology by using keyframe animation extraction method. This method works by extracting all the 3D body joints coordinates of every frame in the keyframe dance animation and reconstruct the extracted motion data into an empty character model to check whether the extracted and reconstructed 3D Zapin dance motion data is correct and efficient compare to the original dance motion in the videos.
... It is, generally, said that a Picture is worth a thousand words, then in this case an animated video is worth ten-thousand word. Tons of information and data can be conveyed by means of moving image called animation, because the eyebrains assembles a sequences of image and interprets them as a continuous movement [20] [8]. ...
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