Controlling 3D characters by hand motion

Abstract

A method to control motions of complex 3D characters interactively using hand movements is described. After capturing actor's motion, by motion capture systems transfer it as it is to 3D character’s motion. Motion capture fails, however, when the target character is of shape far different from that of the actor captured. This article proposes manipulating 3D character by controllable parameters extracted from monocular image of the actor's hand without reconstructing its posture. Using Digital Puppet System which implements this method allows a user to easily manipulate characters of various shapes ranging from a human-type robot to a mollusk with largescale set of joints. By extracting as many controllable parameters as possible, our method makes maximal use of available information which is not necessarily enough for posture reconstruction.