“Rhythmic Character Animation: Interactive Chinese Lion Dance”

Being able to create a stylistic animation with high-level controls has always been a design goal for computer animation software. In this paper, we propose a procedural animation system, called Rhy CAP (Rhythmic Character Animation Playacting system), that allows a designer to interactively direct the animated characters by adjusting rhythmic parameters such as tempo, exaggeration, and timing. We use the Chinese lion dance as an example to illustrate the effectiveness of the interactive system in generating expressive character motions. Enacting the lion in the real life is a great challenge requiring seamless coordination between the two dancers acting for the head and the tail of the lion. Similarly, it is also challenging and labor-intensive to create the animation of a dynamic lion dance with traditional animation software or with the motion capture techniques.

Chen, J. R. 2004. Rhythm & Motion: Animating Chinese Lion Dance with High-level Controls. Master thesis, Computer Science Dept., National Chengchi Univ.