1. High Level Motion Authoring for Articulated Figures
Michael Wasserman & Michael Ilardi

2. Concept
What if you could just tell your articulated figure to walk or wave its hand?
Using a timeline interface, an artist could “paint” animations onto an articulated figure.
Using Maya this could be rendered as a 3D animation for some given hierarchical bone structure.

3. Demo Using these simple commands: Produce this animation:
takepose posename rootofpose
(Timeline editing)
takeplist plistname
Produce this animation:
(Play clips)

4. Tools Maya – Professional level modeling and animation software
MEL – Maya’s Embedded (scripting) Language
Maya API – Application Programming Interface (C++, plug-ins)
Our tools
Skeleton and Skin – Gimbal rotations, root translations, and subd.
Setpose – A plug-in used to record information about the state of the articulated figure to a .pose file
Timeline – Graphical interface for creating .plist and .anim files from .pose and .anim files (hierarchical, open, manipulate, save, export)
Takeplist – A plug-in to apply a .plist scene to the articulated figure

5. Whodunit? Mike Wasserman Mike Ilardi Timeline XXX Setpose X Takeplist
Articulated Figure
Figure Skin
Animation

6. Conclusion
Both of us realized that tackling the intricacies of Maya’s scripting language, API, and the plethora of data structures required to administrate an animation (and give it a graphic interface) was a much larger project than originally thought.
As such, we were compelled to use Maya’s internal interpolation algorithms, not our own.
IK vs. FK tradeoffs