Demo Hour

Rig animation with a tangible and modular device

This demo presents a novel approach to digital character animation, combining the benefits of modular and tangible input devices and sophisticated rig animation algorithms. We overcome limitations inherent in all previous tangible devices using a symbiotic software and hardware approach. It allows users to directly control complex rigs with only 5 to 10 physical modules. These compact input device configurations—optimized for a specific rig and a set of sample poses—are automatically generated by an algorithm. This avoids oversimplification of the pose space and excessively bulky devices.

Glauser, O., Ma, W.-C., Panozzo, D., Jacobson, A., Hilliges, O., and Sorkine-Hornung, O. Rig animation with a tangible and modular input device. ACM Trans. Graph. 35, 4 (2016); http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2925909

http://igl.ethz.ch/projects/rig-animation-input-device/

Oliver Glauser, ETH Zurich,
[email protected]

Benedek Vartok, ETH Zurich

Wan-Chun Ma, Activision, Inc.

Daniele Panozzo, New York University

Alec Jacobson, Columbia University and University of Toronto

Otmar Hilliges, ETH Zurich

Olga Sorkine-Hornung, ETH Zurich

Example posing session of a bunny character, with a device consisting of four modular parts.

©2017 ACM  1072-5520/17/01  $15.00

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.