Sleight of hand

Subtle animation details such as finger or facial movements help to bring virtual characters to life and increase their appeal. However, it is not always possible to capture finger animations simultaneously with full-body motion, due to limitations of the setup or tight production schedules. Therefore, hand motions are often either omitted, manually created by animators, or captured during a separate session and spliced with full body animation. In this paper, we investigate the perceived fidelity of hand animations where all the degrees of freedom of the hands are computed from reduced marker sets. In a set of perceptual experiments, we found that finger motions reconstructed with inverse kinematics from a reduced marker set of eight markers per hand are perceived to be very similar to the corresponding motions reconstructed using a full set of twenty markers. We demonstrate how using this reduced set of eight large markers enabled us to capture the finger and full-body motions of two actors performing a range of relatively unconstrained actions using a 13-camera motion capture system. This serves to simplify the capture process and to significantly reduce the time for cleanup, while preserving the natural biological movements of the hands relative to the actions performed.