Shape and Animation by Example

The magic of computer graphics as seen in many current movies and computer games comes at a cost.Creating the geometric forms with which to generate synthetic characters and animating the characters to bring them to life requires either highly skilled artists and/or sophisticated capture devices.Both are expensive and, in the case of highly skilled artists, rare.This paper discusses and demonstrates a methodology to automatically create new shapes and animations from existing geometric forms and motions.Our approach differs from previous work by allowing for extrapolation and interpolation between multiple forms as well as motions.In addition, our methodology is efficient enough to be used in an interactive runtime setting.The paradigm presented here is one of design by example. New shapes and animations are created on the fly through multi-way blending of examples.