A Style Controller for Generating Virtual Human Behaviors

Creating a virtual character that exhibits realistic physical behaviors requires a rich set of animations. To mimic the variety as well as the subtlety of human behavior, we may need to animate not only a wide range of behaviors but also variations of the same type of behavior influenced by the environment and the state of the character, including the emotional and physiological state. A general approach to this challenge is to gather a set of animations produced by artists or motion capture. However, this approach can be extremely costly in time and effort. In this work, we propose a model that can learn styled motion generation and an algorithm that produce new styles of motions via style interpolation. The model takes a set of styled motions as training samples, and can create new motions that are the generalization among given styles of motions. Our style interpolation algorithm can blend together motions with distinct styles, and it also helps improve the performance of previous work. We verify our algorithm using walking motions of different styles, and the experimental results show that our method is significantly better than previous work.

Authors

• Chung-Cheng Chiu
• Stacy Marsella

Keywords

• Style-Content Separation
• Restricted Boltzmann Machines
• Virtual Agent
• Animation
• Motion Capture