Puppetry-inspired Animation: A Midair Hand Gestures Manipulation for 3D Character Animation

Bringing together keyframe and motion-timing can be very difficult to control especially when manipulating body parts of a character animation. Both seem are ‘detach’ in their event as keyframe is physically visible, while timing is imperceptible and merely appears as substance of a sequence of keyframes. This paper presents an overview of my doctoral research, which focuses on an approach to create a puppetry-like animation technique in computer animation that provides an embodied interaction between user and animated character. The proposed project investigates how character animation acquires direct response from the user hand-centered direct manipulation using Leap Motion. Such midair motion-sensing device is used to automate keyframes that create motion timing for character animation based on the timing of a user’s movements.