Animating Non-Human Characters using Human Motion Capture Data Laurel Bancroft 1 and Jessica Hodgins 2 1 College of Fine Arts, Carngie Mellon University, lbancrof@andrew.cmu.edu 2 Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, jkh@cs.cmu.edu ABSTRACT This paper presents a large problem in 3D animation, which is animating non-human characters with human motion capture data. Many techniques of altering motion capture data are discussed and explored, and many new research problems are defined, which build upon existing techniques of modifying motion capture data. KEYWORDS Non-human characters, motion capture 1. INTRODUCTION The main goal of this research project is to provide a way to animate a non- human character using an actor’s performance during a motion capture session. Using Autodesk’s Maya [1] as a starting ground, different techniques of manipulating motion capture data were explored. The sub goals of this project are 1.) Use different data manipulation techniques to animate different categories of objects and characters. 2.) Differentiate what techniques would work best on different types of objects. 3.) Understand previously implemented techniques of animating non-human characters and building upon them. This paper will present previously published and related work, what has been achieved, and what still needs to be achieved to accomplish our above goal. 2. MOTIVATION AND BACKGROUND In the history of animation, the animated character has been a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and personified objects. For example, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast [2] or Pixar’s Toy Story [3] are two very popular animations which revolve around personified non-human objects. While one part of the challenge is to map the human motion capture data onto the non-humanoid character, the other more difficult part of the challenge is to preserve the