Leveraging the Talent of Hand Animators to Create Three-Dimensional Animation

Abstract

The skills required to create compelling three-dimensional animation using computer software are quite different from those required to create compelling hand animation with pencil and paper. The three-dimensional medium has several advantages over the traditional medium- it is easy to relight the scene, render it from different viewpoints, and add physical simulations. In this work, we propose a method to leverage the talent of traditionally trained hand animators to create three-dimensional animation, while allowing them to work in the medium that is familiar to them. The input to our algorithm is a set of hand-animated frames. Our key insight is to use motion capture data as a source of domain knowledge and 'lift' the two-dimensional animation to three dimensions, while maintaining the unique style of the input animation. A motion capture clip is projected to two dimensions, the limbs are aligned with the hand-drawn frames, and then the motion is reconstructed into three dimensions. We demonstrate our algorithm on a variety of hand animated motion sequences on different characters, including ballet, a stylized sneaky walk, and a sequence of jumping jacks.