Determination of camera parameters for character motions using motion area

Abstract

We propose a method to determine camera parameters for character motion, which considers the motion by itself. The basic idea is to approximately compute the area swept by the motion of the character’s links that are orthogonally projected onto the image plane, which we call “motion area”. Using the motion area, we can determine good fixed camera parameters and camera paths for a given character motion in the off-line or real-time camera control. In our experimental results, we demonstrate that our camera path generation algorithms can compute a smooth moving camera path while the camera effectively displays the dynamic features of character motion. Our methods can be easily used in combination with the method for generating occlusion-free camera paths. We expect that our methods can also be utilized by the general camera planning method as one of heuristics for measuring the visual quality of the scenes that include dynamically moving characters.