Animating by multi-level sampling

We describe a method for synthesizing joint angle and translation data based on the information in motion capture data. The synthetic data is realistic not only in that it resembles the original training data, but in that it has random variations that are statistically similar to what one would find in repeated measurements of the motion. To achieve this result, the training data is broken into frequency bands using a wavelet decomposition, and the information in these bands is used to create the synthetic data one frequency band at a time. The method takes into account the fact that there are correlations among numerous features of the data. For example, a point characterized by a particular time and frequency band will depend upon points close to it in time in other frequency bands. Such correlations are modeled with a kernel-based representation of the joint probability distributions of the features. The data is synthesized by sampling from these densities and improving the results using a new iterative maximization technique. We have applied this technique to the synthesis of joint angle and translation data of a wallaby hopping on a treadmill. The synthetic data was used to animate characters that have limbs proportional to the wallaby.