Section: New Results

Contact Preserving Shape Transfer for Motion Retargeting

Figure 7. Motion Retargeting: Instead of transferring the pose from a source to a target shape, we propose to transfer the shape of the target to the deformed source character.

Retargeting a motion from a source to a target character is an important problem in computer animation, as it allows to reuse existing rigged databases or transfer motion capture to virtual characters. Surface based pose transfer is a promising approach to avoid the trial-and-error process when controlling the joint angles. In this work we investigated whether shape transfer instead of pose transfer would better preserve the original contextual meaning of the source pose. To this end, we proposed an optimization-based method to deform the source shape+pose using three main energy functions: similarity to the target shape, body part volume preservation, and collision management (preserve existing contacts and prevent penetrations). The results show that this strategy is able to retarget complex poses, including several contacts, to very different morphologies. In particular, we introduced new contacts that are linked to the change in morphology, and which would be difficult to obtain with previous works based on pose transfer that aim at distance preservation between body parts.

This result was published in the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion Interaction and Games (MIG'19) [12].