Recurrent transition networks for character locomotion

We present a novel approach, based on deep recurrent neural networks, to automatically generate transition animations given a past context of a few frames, a target character state and optionally local terrain information. The proposed Recurrent Transition Network (RTN) is trained without any gait, phase, contact or action labels. Our system produces realistic and fluid transitions that rival the quality of Motion Capture-based animations, even without any inverse-kinematics post-process. Our system could accelerate the creation of transition variations for large coverage or even replace transition nodes in a game's animation graph. The RTN also shows impressive results on a temporal super-resolution task.