Abstract
In this thesis, we present a novel three-dimensional human motion synthesis method by sketching two-dimensional trajectories of end joints. According to conventional 2D animation work, before an artist draws a complicated human motion, he usually first sketches trajectories of some important joints and then completes the desired motion based on these trajectories. In this study we extended this approach to three-dimensional human motion synthesis. By sketching the projected trajectories of root, head, left wrist, right wrist, left ankle and right ankle to a side plan, we propose an inverse- kinematics-based algorithm for synthesizing three-dimensional human motions. Moreover, in order to smooth the trajectories of joints, we use b-spline to represent trajectory curves. We also present an optimization method to improve the quality of synthesizes motion. Finally, several examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.