Computing the Duration of Motion Transitions: An Empirical Approach
Jing Wang and Bobby Bodenheimer
Symposium on Computer Animation 2004
Abstract
This paper develops methods for determining a visually appealing
length for a motion transition, i.e., a segue between two sequences of
character animation. Motion transitions are an important component in
generating compelling animation streams in virtual environments and
computer games. For reasons of efficiency and speed, linear
interpolation is often used as the transition method, where the motion
is blended between specified start and end frames. The blend length of
a transition using this technique is critical to the visual appearance
of the motion. Two methods for determining an optimal blend length
for such transitions are presented. These methods are suited to
different types of motion. They are empirically evaluated through user
studies. For the motions tested, we find (1) that visually pleasing
transitions can be generated using our optimal blend lengths without
further tuning of the blending parameters; and (2), that users prefer
these methods over a generic fixed-length blend.
The accompanying video is here (31 MB).
Bobby Bodenheimer 
Last modified: Mon Oct 18 20:14:22 CDT 2004