The goal of this bibliography is to give the reader some entry points into the literature. We have listed some of the important and useful references. Rather than a long list of citations, we have tried to provide some discussion of each reference to help you understand why you might want to seek it out.
Our goal is not to be encyclopedic or comprehensive: there are plenty of things that are missing. Just because it is not here, does not imply a judgement of it.
Sometimes, we have purposely included some more obscure or unusual papers that provide alternative points of view, or wierd ideas.
I have included references that go beyond the scope of motion capture to computer animation more generally.
Alberto Menache. Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation and Video Games. Morgan Kaufman, 2000.
This book is the first comprehensive book on motion capture. It is quite good in some areas (for example, its discussion of anatomy for motion capture), and weak in others (it scaresely mentions editing). Some people dislike the book because it has a bit of a negative attitude toward the motion capture business.
Michael Gleicher. Animation from Observation: Motion Capture and Motion Editing. Computer Graphics 33(4), p51-54. Special Issue on Applications of Computer Vision to Computer Graphics.
This is a very short survey paper that I wrote for a special issue of the SIGGRAPH newsletter "Computer Graphics." While short, I think it conveys my viewpoint well.
Michael Gleicher. Motion Capture and Editing: From Movement to Animation.
This is the current working title for a book that I am working on. The project has a long history of successes and failures. People who have been involved include Moon Ryul Jung, Ron Fischer and Jeff Thingvold. Much to the chagrin of our very patient publisher (AK Peters), I am not sure when to expect this project to be completed (or to at least produce a book). Right now, I am taking the role of "lead author," and this is a lot of work for an Assistant Professor. Small snippets of the book seem to be appearing in places such as the notes to this course.
Scott Dyer, Jeff Martin, John Zulauf. Motion Capture White Paper, 1995. On-line
This paper keeps coming up again and again. For a long time, it was the only survey of motion capture technologies that was widely distributed. Now, it is quite dated (1995).
Lander, J., Working With Motion Capture File Formats - Game Developer, Jan. 1998
Information on currently accepted file formats for motion data and how to interpret them.
Kines, M., Planning a Motion Capture Shoot - Game Developer, Sept. 1998
You can achieve a lot with motion capture, and you can also waste a lot of time and money. Your project's schedule and budget depend on a well planned and executed shoot.
Melianthe Kines. Planning and Directing Motion Capture For Games. 1998 Game Developers Conference. Available online at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000119/kines_01.htm
Another good article on planning and executing a motion capture shoot well.
I include these here because everyone should have some understanding of these things, and awareness of what these references talk about.
Lasseter, J. Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to Computer Animation. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '87.
This is the reference for what animation means in computer
science. Much of this is the same material in the intro chapter of "The Illusion
of Life," but simply making the graphics world aware of that material was a
major achievement.
There is an on-line summary of this paper, but the paper is so important
that you should read it.
Lasseter, J. Tricks to Animating Characters with a Computer. SIGGRAPH '94 Course Notes "Animation Tricks".
This is more of the same thoughts on how to make animation from a person who not only is a master, but had learned from the master. It is online.
Thomas, F. and Johnson, O., The Illusion of Life, Abbeville Press, 1981. Chapter 3: Principles of Animation.
This chapter is the reference for the "Disney Animated Style." It's also a gorgeous object to have on your coffee table. Unfortunately, it is out of print again, and copies are fetching ridiculous prices.
Animated Cartoons: How they are made, their origin and development. E. G. Lutz.
This is a 1920 book on animation that is neat because it predates the "modern art" of animation. There is a modern reprint available from Applewood Books.
Richard Parent. Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques. The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling, Brian A. Barsky, Series Editor. To be published July 2001.
This book is not available yet (but should be by the time you read this). What makes this book important is that it is one of the few books on computer animation that is both technical and comprehensive.
Alan Watt and Fabio Policarpo. 3D Games: Real-time Rendering and Software Technology. Addison-Wlsey, 2001.
This is a suprising book. While the subject matter is clearly about the development of computer games, in the process, the authors provide one of the best, most up-to-date textbooks on computer graphics in general.
Catmull, E. A System for Computer Generated Movies. Proceedings of the 1972 ACM annual conference.
One of the earliest (if not the earliest) papers on 3D computer animation. What's amazing about this is that the problems he faced then are still the problems we face now. This paper is more for historical perspective than anything else.
Grassia, S. A Practical Formulation of the Exponential Map for Rotations. To Appear in the Journal of Graphics Tools.
This paper introduces exponential maps to the graphics community. What makes this paper particularly useful is that it compares amongst the representations that are popular in graphics and animation, and discusses the suitability of each to many of the problems that people commonly face.
Shoemake, K. Animating Rotation with Quaternion Curves. SIGGRAPH '85. (the original version has some known typos, in the SIGGRAPH '91 Course Notes "Math for Computer Graphics" it is reprinted with corrections).
This is "the" reference for Quaternions in computer graphics. This paper is pretty much responsible for introducing the graphics community to quaternions, so everyone cites it. Even if you learn quaternions from elsewhere, you should be familiar with this paper.
Ken has some other nice notes about quaternions on the web.
Bobick, N. Rotating Objects Using Quaternions. Game Developer Magazine, July 1998.
Do not be discouraged by the non-academic publication: this
is a good tutorial on Quaternions!
I stumbled on this reference while
searching the web for Shoemake's stuff. It's a nice, consice, description that
really cuts to the chase of what you need to do to actually use quaternions,
along with some intuitions of why. On line version.
Murray, R. Li, Z. and Sastry, S. A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation. CRC Press, 1994.
This book is the only place I ever really saw exponential coordinates discussed in any kind of useful way (until the very recent graphics and vision papers).
Shoemake, K. and Duff, T. Matrix Animation and Polar Decompositions. Proceedings of Graphics Interface '92.An interesting paper that tries to develop a way to interpolate between two transformation matrices. The moral of the story is that you don't want to interpolate matrices. This paper is an attempt to try to do it, if you really have to. The main reason I like this paper is that it helps develop intuitions for what transformation matrices really do.
D. Tolani, A. Goswami, and N. Badler: "Real-time inverse kinematics techniques for anthropomorphic limbs." Graphical Models 62 (5), Sept. 2000, pp. 353-388.
One great feature of this paper is that it has a comprehensive literature survey on inverse kinematics for computer animation. The focus of the paper is the introduction of a very fast IK solver for the specific case of a 7 degree of freedom limb. The solver described in this paper is available from the The Center for Human Modeling and Simulation at the University of Pennsylvania. Information can be found here.
Maciejewski, A. Dealing with the Ill-Conditioned Equations of Motion for Articulated Figures. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, May 1990.
Discusses some of the basic problems with doing IK in a nice way. I'm not sold on his solution to the problems (and this paper is a bit dated), but it a good paper for making you think.
Zhao, J and Badler, N. Inverse Kinematics Positioning Using Nonlinear Programming for Highly Articulated Figures. ACM Transactions on Graphics, October 1994.
The basic idea, that IK is a non-linear constraint solving problem, so feed it to a non-linear constraint solver, seems so obvious, but this is really the place where they wrote it down. It is probably better to learn the optimization algorithms from an optimization text.
Wellman, C. Inverse Kinematics and Geometric Constraints for Articulated Figure Manipulation. Masters Thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1993.
This is slightly obscure, but it has a nice survey for its
related work section, and actually discusses a lot of the details and compares
many different approaches.
You can get a copy on-line.
Issacs and Cohen. Controlling Dynamic Simulation with Kinematic Constraints, Behavior Functions, and Inverse Dynamics. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '87.
This paper is important since its really the first place where the put together inverse dynamics and animator control. There methods are a bit simplistic by today's standards (and have been superceded), but they did get things to work.
Pose Space Deformation: A Unified Approach to Shape Interpolation and Skeleton-Driven Deformation. John Lewis, Matt Cordner, Nickson Fong. SIGGRAPH '00.
Introduces a method for blending betwen multiple skins to cure much of the problems with normal skinning. Most importantly, it gives a great description of the basic linear-blend skinning.
Peter-Pike Sloan, Charles Rose, and Michael Cohen. Shape by Example. Proceedings of the 2001 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics.
A variant of pose-space deformations with a different underlying implementation.
Inkwell: A 2 1/2D Animation System. Peter Litwinowicz. SIGGRAPH '91.
This system was one of the first systems to provide motion signal processing tools.
Motion Signal Processing. Armin Bruderlin and Lance Williams.
SIGGRAPH '95, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp.
97-104.
Motion Warping. Andy Witkin and Zoran Popovic. SIGGRAPH '95, Computer
Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 105-108 .
These two papers really began the wave of tools for motion editing. The Bruderlin and Williams paper applies a large number of signal processing operations to motions. One of the methods they introduced, Motion Displacement Mapping, was simultaneously introduced as Motion Warping by Witkin and Popovic.
Fourier Principles for Emotion-based Human Figure Animation. Munetoshi Unuma and Ken Anjyo and Ryozo Takeuchi, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 95, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 91-96
Another early attempt to apply signal processing to motion data.
Motion Editing with Spacetime Constraints. Michael Gleicher, 1997 Symposium
on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 139-148
Constraint-based Motion Adaptation.
Michael Gleicher and Peter Litwinowicz, The Journal of Visualization and
Computer Animation, 9:65-94, 1998
Retargetting Motion to New Characters.
Michael Gleicher, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 98, Computer Graphics Proceedings,
Annual Conference Series, pp. 33-42
These three papers describe how to implement motion editing techniques using a spacetime constraint approach. They all solve a single large optimization problem for the entire motion. The 1997 paper describes the tricks required to achieve interactive performance. The Retargeting paper describes a more comprehensive solution to a more real problem. The Motion Adaptation paper (which actually predates the other two) includes our early experiments with the approach.
Physically Based Motion Transformation. Zoran Popovic and Andrew Witkin, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 99, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 11-20
This work also applies a spacetime constraint approach to motion editing. However, rather than making the simplifications to the constraints that Gleicher does, they preserve physics but simplify the character.
Motion Path Editing. Michael Gleicher. 2001 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics.
This paper describes a method for changing the "path" that a character moves along. For example, a character walking in a straight line can be modified to walk along a curved path. The simpler variants of the techniques are very easy to implement.
A Hierarchical Approach to Interactive Motion Editing for Human-like Figures. Jehee Lee and Sung-Yong Shin, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 99, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 39-48
Describes a system that solve similar motion editing tasks (such as retargeting) as spacetime approaches, using a strategy that is easier to implement.
Comparing Constraint-Based Motion Editing Approaches. Michael Gleicher. To appear in Graphical Models.
This paper presents a taxonomy of constraint-based motion editing methods. Particular attention is payed to the comparison of Spacetime and PFIK+F (per frame inverse kinematics plus filtering, such as Lee&Shin '99) approaches.
Verbs and Adverbs: Multidimensional Motion Interpolation. Charles Rose and Michael F. Cohen and Bobby Bodenheimer, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 18(5), pp. 32-40.
An application of motion blending to generate a variety of motion.
Efficient Generation of Motion Transitions using Spacetime Constraints.Charles F. Rose and Brian Guenter and Bobby Bodenheimer and Michael F. Cohen, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 96, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 147-154
Style Machines, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2000. Matthew Brand and Aaron Hertzmann, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 183-192
While there are a great many resources on numerical methods and algorithms, many are written from a theoretical viewpoint. Here, we try to identify resources that are particularly useful to animation practitioners. Again, our aim is not to be encyclopedic: what we list here are references that we have found useful.
One book deserves special mention, as it will appear several times throughout this bibliography:
William Press, Saul Teukolsky, William Vettering, Brian Flannery. Numerical Recipes in C, corrected 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
This book is an invaluable resource for the graphics and animation practitioner. While it lacks the formalism of a "proper" numerics textbook, it does an amazing at providing the intuitions behind the algorithms, helping you understand what algorithm to choose, and providing you with an implementation of the algorithm. If you want the gory details of how an algorithm works, or a proof of something, look elsewhere. However, if you have a problem to solve and need to get a quick idea of what to do and how to do it, this book is it.
The text of this book is available on the web. However, it is an indispensable addition to anyone's bookshelf. Highly recommended.
Optimization, of various forms, is an extremely useful tool. For performance capture and animation it can be used for a wide variety of things including fitting skeletons to markers, adjusting motions, and performing inverse kinematics.
William Press, Saul Teukolsky, William Vettering, Brian Flannery. Numerical Recipes in C, corrected 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Numerical Recipes is a good place to start when looking for information on optimization. It includes implementations of many of the basic algorithms, and is very good at providing the intuitions behind many of the most significant approaches. See our discussion.
Jorge Nocedal and Stephen Wright. Numerical Optimization. Springer Series in Operations Research, 1999.
A new, advanced text on the subject of optimization. The biggest problem with this book is that it is dauntingly encyclopedic. It contains almost all of the most modern algorithms, a discussion of much of the theoretical foundations, explanation of many of the practical details, yet also takes time to explain many of the basic intuitions.
Roger Fletcher. Practical Methods of Optimization. John Wiley and Sons, 1990.
This is the book that I learned it from. It is a bit dated, although the theory and the major classes of algorithms do not change (they just get added to).
The field of computer vision has an immense literature. A great on-line bibliography has been compiled at USC: http://iris.usc.edu/Vision-Notes/bibliography/contents.html
Moeslund, Thomas B. "Summaries of 107 Computer Vision-Based Human Motion Capture Papers", March 1999.
This paper and its companion "Computer Vision-Based Human Motion Capture - A Survey" are available from the Lab for Image Analysis, University of Aalborg, Denmark as Technical Reports LIA 99-01, and LIA 99-02. Both papers give a comprehensive overview of the work done on human motion capture using computer vision. The first is basically an annotated bibliography. Both papers can be obtained at: http://www.lia.auc.dk/cgi-bin/liapublications.cgi
While the literature on tracking is extensive (see Price's site given above), the following papers deal with whole body motion.H. Sidenbladh, M. J. Black and D. J. Fleet. "Stochastic tracking of 3D human figures using 2D image motion." In European Conference on Computer Vision, vol 2, pp 702-718, Dublin, Ireland 2000.
Black et. al.'s work on using probabilitistic methods to track humans produces promising results. Accuracies are on the order of 5 degrees for joint angles.
C. Bregler and J. Malik. "Tracking people with twists and exponential maps". In Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 8-15, 1998.
The mathematical formulation is given for tracking kinematic linkages by combining blob tracking with dynamic motion models of the target. A precise initial configuration of the target is required. The paper is also available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bregler/bregler_malik_cvpr98.ps.gz
C. Wren, A. Azarbayejani, T. Darrell, A. Pentland, “Pfinder: Real-Time Tracking of the Human Body” PAMI, July 1997, vol 19, no 7, pp. 780-785
Pfinder is a blob-tracking system that can locate a person quickly. The spatial accuracy is best suited for applications requiring crude information. The paper and other details are available at http://vismod.www.media.mit.edu/vismod/demos/pfinder/
Some basic tracking papers include:S. Sclaroff and J. Isidoro. Active blobs. In Proc. Int. Conf. Computer Vision, 1998.
Tracking regions using a template-like model with the ability to handle deformations and distortions.
G. Hager and P. Belhumeur. Efficient region tracking with parametric models of geometry and illumination. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 20(10):1025-1039, 1998.
Tracking (faces) that is robust to shape changes (expression) and variation in illumination.
C. Rasmussen and G. Hager An Adaptive Model for Tracking Objects by Color,
Blob tracking based on color that goes well beyond simple thresholding. http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~hager/Public/Publications/ras_hager_color.ps.gz