Authoring human figure animation in a multimedia system

Designing and simulating complex scenes which include multiple actors and other elements such as lighting, speech, and music is a complex task which requires specialized software and experienced animators. This report addresses the issue to get approximate but rapid design of animated scenes to concretize and preview possible ideas without spending too much time specifying all the details. A user-priented approach relying on a building block basis is proposed, which applies to all the elements in a scene including human figure animations. Animations are generated by adapting existing key framed motion data. This is a general strategy which is applicable to all movements and speeds up considerably the composition of complex animated scenes. It is extended to generate cyclic movements such as walking and running. A tool to design and edit a scene interactively and display the simulation in real time on a standard PC is used to test this approach.