James Williams Undergraduate Dissertation 2015/16

Using human motion capture to control animal movement.

Supervised by S.Maddock

Abstract

Today, many films and computer games make use of 3D animal animation in order to convey scenes that would otherwise be unfeasible or impossible to create. The task for creating animal movement, however, is time consuming and expensive as animations are usually created frame by frame.

This project aims to explore an alternative method that should cut animation times drastically by using human motion capture to control the movement of 3D long-necked animal models in real time. Options for mapping human motion to non-human motion will be experimented on using the Microsoft Kinect .

Through the Unity game engine, software is created that allows users to produce customisable joint associations between human and giraffe joints. This feature was used to develop two unique methods for controlling the giraffe model, producing real-time animation by moving the user's arms or spine to move the neck of the giraffe.