Abstract
An essential form of communication between the director and the animators early in the animation pipeline is rough cut at the motion (a blocked-in animation). This version of the character’s performance allows the director and animators to discuss how the character will play his/her role in each scene. However, blocked-in animation is also quite time-consuming to construct, with short scenes requiring many hours of preparation between presentations. In this paper, we present a puppeteering interface for creating blocked-in motion for characters and various simulation effects more quickly than is possible in a keyframing interface. The animator manipulates one of a set of tracked objects in a motion capture system to control a few degrees of freedom of the character on each take. We explore the design space for the 3D puppeteering interface with a set of seven professional animators using a “think-aloud” protocol. We present a number of animations that they created and compare the time required to create similar animations in our 3D user interface and a commercial keyframing interface.
Copyright Notice
The documents contained in these directories are included by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author’s copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.