Evaluating distance metrics for animation blending

  • Authors:
  • B. J. H. van Basten;A. Egges

  • Affiliations:
  • Center for Advanced Gaming and Simulation, Utrecht, The Netherlands;Center for Advanced Gaming and Simulation, Utrecht, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Reusing motion capture data is of great importance in games and simulations. Therefore, many techniques from motion synthesis aim at concatenating or blending existing pieces of motion. For concatenation, a distance metric is required to detect good transition points. In this paper, three common distance metrics are evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the quantitive analysis we evaluate foot-skate, path deviation and on-line running time. The qualitative analysis is done by a user study. We observed that the point cloud metric results in a very slow graph search and a high path deviation compared to the other metrics. However, this metric results in less foot skating. We also show that increasing the graph size does not alway introduce more visual artifacts. Based on our observations, we propose a set of guidelines when using these metrics in a motion synthesizer.