CSC 2529 Winter 2004 Suggested Projects

• Figure of 8 walking The motion trail created by a human pelvis resembles a figure of 8 on its side. Design an interface where an arbitrary walk cycle is corrected to match up with its closest figure of 8 shape and then allow a user to edit this curve to generate variations in the walk.
• Event snapping When keyframing animations many keys have a cause effect behavior and the animation does not make sense if the keys are just transformed en masse. Design an approach where events defined as linkages by a user stick together appropriately as an animation is edited. Think of music beats as one set of events and syncing an animation to the music as grid snapping to the beat.
• Motion drawings Pencil sketches are a useful means of quickly creating various object shapes. Develop an abstraction for sketching animated motions without having to sketch individual motion curves. Restricting yourself to a particular character and a particular class of motions will help a lot.
• Picturing motion Given a complex human motion (e.g., a trampolinist doing a double back flip with a double twist), how can the motion be best visualized using one or two images? Pose this as an optimization problem that can be automatically solved.
• Behavioral modeling of everyday motions When a person sits in a chair to watch a presentation or sits in a chair in front of a desk, they never really stop moving. Build a simple behavioral model of the types of motions typically observed for these situations.
• Dynamic controllers from motion capture Given a human motion and a dynamic controller for it, compute the parameters of the controller to fit sample motions obtained using motion capture. Fingers plucking guitar strings or a percussionist playing are  good example motions. 
• Patterns in motion find repetitive patterns in motion curves and abstract them so they repeated in different contexts. Examples of this are lip movements for the same word spoken multiple times in a passage or someone shaking a leg subconsciously.
• Interactive character poser/animator: Implement techniques for interactively posing and animating a character's skeleton within a 3D volume display using motion capture as the input.
• Interactive character poser/animator II: Implement techniques for interactively posing and animating a character's skeleton on a large display wall using motion capture as the input.
• Interactive character poser/animator III: Implement techniques for interactively posing and animating a character's skeleton that uses a motion graph as a set of known motion and haptic feedback from a phantom to allow the user to explore the motion space of the character.
• Reactive Motion Build a system for higher level motion of a stick figure. The system should bassically cause the character to move in a manner that is reactive to the character's perception of the environment. Imagine a boxer in a ring.
• Musculature based skinning Build a musculature based skinning algorithm that works from the outside in. It takes a model in the rest pose that muscles are fit to. From there on the musculature drives the deformation of the skin.

Student Projects

• Noah Lockwood, Patricio Simari - Acting and direction on large display.
• Mike McGuffin, Anand Agarawala - Behavioural game with temporal navigation
• Adam Robson - Behavioral game.
• Matin de Lasa - Skeletal Dynamics
• Jack Bibliowicz - Facial analogies
• Jack Wang - Learning controllers
• Steve Tsang - Interactive game  attribute authoring.