Intelligent toolkit for procedural animation of human behaviors

The use of optical motion capture systems to produce high quality humanoid motion sequences has recently become increasingly popular in many areas such as high-end gaming, cinema movie and animation production, and for educational purposes. Motion capture studios are expensive to employ or are unavailable to many people and locales. For this reason, the reuse of existing motion capture data and the resulting high-quality animation is an important area of research. Strict motion capture data restricts users to pre-recorded movement that does not allow the addition of dynamic behaviors required in advanced games and interactive environment. Our procedural animation method offers animators high quality animations produced from an optical motion capture session, without incurring the cost of running their own sessions. This method utilizes a database of common animations sequences, derived from several motion capture sessions, which animators can manipulate and apply to their own existing characters through the use of our procedural animation toolkit. The basic animation types include walk, run, and jump sequences that can be applied with personality variations that correspond to a character's gender, age, and energy levels.