Our focus has been on the creation of methods for adapting existing good motions to meet new needs.
Core to any motion editing task is the issue of describing what should change and what shouldn't change as the motion is transformed. Our goal is to permit motions to be annotated with properties that should be preserved or changed, and to seek new motions that preserve (or change) these properties yet are as close as possible to the new image. Such a formulation leads naturally to posing motion editing as a constrained optimization.
Find a new motion that...
Subject to the constraints (e.g. the specific things to be preserved or changed)
Minimizes an objective function that measures the difference with the original motion.
Ideally, we would be able to provide a very rich set of constraints and objective functions that map well to the ways we would like to discuss motions. For example, we might want to specify that we must preserve the physical realism and perfect ballet form, and minimze the amount we change the mood and grace of the motion. In practice, we are limited in the types of constraints and objectives that we can handle by pragmatic concerns. We are limited