4. PROPOSED PIPELINE
The proposed pipeline can generate natural human animations efficiently and effectively by overcoming the skeleton incompatibility. The flowchart is shown in Fig. 5, which involves two animation software Maya and MotionBuilder and
has three major steps: skeleton mapping, skin binding and animation generation. The detailed implementation steps are listed in Table 2.
4.1 Skeleton Mapping
As discussed before, the skeleton incompatibility is the most crucial challenge. The skeleton mapping aims at bridging the gap between mocap skeleton and the default software skeleton by defining a mapping template. Since the default software skeleton is connected with built-in algorithms, the mocap skeleton has to be consistent with this skeleton in the joint names and structure. We employed MotionBuilder for its capabilities and flexibilities on the skeleton conversion.
MotionBuilder enables users to manually build the joint relationship between the mocap skeleton and the software one and plot the built-in FK/IK (forward and inverse kinematics) controllers onto the skeleton. We save it as the skeleton
mapping template. By using the template, the joint name is automatically changed and a new software skeleton is constructed following the mocap skeleton hierarchical structure.
Once the conversion template is generated, it can be usedfor any mocap data from the same data set