A Novel Framework for 3D Computer Animation Systems for Nonprofessional Users Using an Automatic Rigging Algorithm

This paper presents a novel framework for developing automatic animation systems, which accept a 3D model that is created at runtime. Previous systems cannot deal with such a 3D model because it needs to be prepared by a manual process (rigging) that may not be suitable for nonprofessional users. The proposed framework solves this problem by employing an automatic rigging algorithm. Our algorithm can generate an animation skeleton for a given 3D model automatically, including the anatomical meaning of each joint. The relationship between motion data and this animation skeleton is created by identifying the corresponding joints in the motion data and the skeleton. The motion data for each joint is transferred automatically to the 3D model that has been rigged via our automatic rigging algorithm. Because all processes can be completed without any user intervention, an animation system for nonprofessional users is therefore available. We also discuss several motion editing techniques that can be used to generate new motion data without complex processing.