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

1. In this paper, we propose a method to leverage the unique talent of traditional animators to create 3D animation while allowing them to continue to work with pencil and paper.2. Tradition pen and paper animators are very good at creating moods and blocking out scenes and the general aesthetics of movement, but these skill s don’t directly map to the skills of 3D animators. We want things 3D so we can do things like create arbitrary lighting and camera angles and large scale physical simulations, and we’d like to draw on the skills of 2D animators to do this.3. Hand drawn animators create a short pen and pencil animation. 3D Reconstruction techniques are used to map a reference model to the animation, with the constraints of maintaining both the pose and timing of the hand drawn image. The results may not be as realistic as actual motion-capped data, but it fits in better with the mental esthetic of the animator.4.The example from the paper is a hand animation of a ballet dancer. While traditional motion capped images could construct a plausible ballet dance animation, hand animators have a lot of experience in making animations that are “more real than real,” with exaggerated poses to make the action look more exciting.
Another good use would be that of quasi-human characters with human poses, and other non-realistic animations. Human animators would have an instinctive notion of how to make action sequences “cute” or “threatening” or “sinister” in a way that motion capture data from real humans could not display.5. http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/lifting2d3d/Lifting_SCA_h264.mov has an example video.