Master of Puppets: An Animation-by-Demonstration Computer Puppetry Authoring Framework

Abstract

This paper presents Master of Puppets (MOP), an animation-by-demonstration framework that allows users to control the motion of virtual characters (puppets) in real time. In the first step, the user is asked to perform the necessary actions that correspond to the character's motions. The user's actions are recorded, and a hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to learn the temporal profile of the actions. During the runtime of the framework, the user controls the motions of the virtual character based on the specified activities. The advantage of the MOP framework is that it recognizes and follows the progress of the user's actions in real time. Based on the forward algorithm, the method predicts the evolution of the user's actions, which corresponds to the evolution of the character's motion. This method treats characters as puppets that can perform only one motion at a time. This means that combinations of motion segments (motion synthesis), as well as the interpolation of individual motion sequences, are not provided as functionalities. By implementing the framework and presenting several computer puppetry scenarios, its efficiency and flexibility in animating virtual characters is demonstrated.

PuppetPhone

“…It makes our tool accessible by a very large audience, and only involves a single hand to be operated. Other works aim to interactively animate virtual characters using abstract gestures [Cui and Mousas 2018;Rhodin et al 2015]. In those techniques, user movements are linked to specific actions of the character, which make it possible to animate any type of character using different devices and body parts.…”