Interactive character animation by learning multi-objective control

Abstract

We present an approach that learns to act from raw motion data for interactive character animation. Our motion generator takes a continuous stream of control inputs and generates the character's motion in an online manner. The key insight is modeling rich connections between a multitude of control objectives and a large repertoire of actions. The model is trained using Recurrent Neural Network conditioned to deal with spatiotemporal constraints and structural variabilities in human motion. We also present a new data augmentation method that allows the model to be learned even from a small to moderate amount of training data. The learning process is fully automatic if it learns the motion of a single character, and requires minimal user intervention if it deals with props and interaction between multiple characters.