An authoring tool to create unique dance animation synchronized with music

Targeted at the general consumers, this paper provides an intuitive and easy-to-use tool to create dance animation as choreographers do. Different from the conventional fully automatic techniques, our novel authoring system allows the user to create his/her own animation interactively like a director. Basically, the user stages the desired performances at specific time instants by his/her unique sense when listening to the music. With the user´s arrangement, the animation is generated by searching a best path on a novel graph structure in the motion database (called meta motion graph), using the efficient dynamic programming algorithm. Comparing the fully automatic systems, the proposed method can generate much more attractive and diverse animation that is well matched with user´s arrangement.