View-Dependent Character Animation

Computer generated 3D animation has matured over the years into a complex art form. Coordinating and presenting the character's movement in three dimensions to convey a specific idea to the audience requires artistic and technical skills, and often a labourious iterative trial-and-error process to get it right. Creating moving camera character animations in 3D is a multi-faceted computer graphics and computer vision problem. Warranting a formal representation of the moving camera, and efficient algorithms to help author the multitude of character poses required for the animation. It is also necessary to deal with issues pertaining to camera and character pose interpolation and visualization of the association between the two. The solution to this problem has to be efficient and elegant from the perspective of a computer scientist, and make sense and be intuitive to use. This well-researched book contains a large number of example animations to explain and illustrate this versatile technique.