Aura Mesh: Motion Retargeting to Preserve the Spatial Relationships between Skinned Characters

Abstract

Applying motion-capture data to multi-person interaction between virtual characters is challenging because one needs to preserve the interaction semantics while also satisfying the general requirements of motion retargeting, such as preventing penetration and preserving naturalness. An efficient means of representing interaction semantics is by defining the spatial relationships between the body parts of characters. However, existing methods consider only the character skeleton and thus are not suitable for capturing skin-level spatial relationships. This paper proposes a novel method for retargeting interaction motions with respect to character skins. Specifically, we introduce the aura mesh, which is a volumetric mesh that surrounds a character’s skin. The spatial relationships between two characters are computed from the overlap of the skin mesh of one character and the aura mesh of the other, and then the interaction motion retargeting is achieved by preserving the spatial relationships as much as possible while satisfying other constraints. We show the effectiveness of our method through a number of experiments.