CSC 2529 Winter 2008 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 indexing from keywords and/or drawings Pencil sketches are a useful means of quickly creating various object shapes. Develop an abstraction for sketching animated motions or using descriptive words as a means to search a database of motion data.
• 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 II: Implement techniques for interactively posing and animating a character's skeleton on a large display wall using your own body and motion capture as the input.
• 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.
• Kinodynamic facial simulation Given a simple blendShape based facial animation setup, add kinodynamic motion based on keyframes using a simple springs and dampers or vortices.