demo animation (mpeg1, 42,059 KB)

This paper presents an animation system that generates an animation from natural language texts such as movie scripts or stories. It also proposes a framework for a motion database that stores numerous motion clips for various characters. We have developed semantic analysis methods to extract information for motion search and scheduling from script-like input texts. Given an input text, the system searches for an appropriate motion clip in the database for each verb in the input text. Temporal constraints between verbs are also extracted from the input text and are used to schedule the motion clips found. In addition, when necessary, certain automatic motions such as locomotion, taking an instrument, changing posture, and cooperative motions are searched for in the database. An animation is then generated using an external motion synthesis system. With our system, users can make use of existing motion clips. Moreover, because it takes natural language text as input, even novice users can use our system.
In this paper, we propose a motion frame that contains meta-information about a motion clip, an object-oriented database framework for storing a lot of motions of a lot of characters in a hierarchical structure, a natural language analysis method that is specialized for extracting motion related descriptions from an input text, and scheduling of multiple motions based on the temporal constraints in the input text.

Publications

• Masaki Oshita, "Generating Animation from Natural Language Texts and Semantic Analysis for Motion Search and Scheduling", The Visual Computer, 14 pages, Springer, May 2010. (to appear) [PDF] [Journal]
  The uploaded PDF is an author-created version. The final publication is available at the journal's website (www.springerlink.com).
  
  
• Masaki Oshita, "Generating Animation from Natural Language Texts and Framework of Motion Database", 2009 International Conference on Cyberworlds, pp. 146-153, Bradford, UK, September 2009. [PDF] [Movie]