Spatial Alignment Results

After a lot of debugging and testing, I believe I have spatial alignment implemented correctly. I would say the difference between using spatial alignment and not using it is noticeable. In general though, the spatial alignment method can preserve details of the lower body motion before the transplant. But is that necessarily a good thing? Here are some of the results:



We can choose to try to align the upper body motion with the lower body motion (as done in the video above) or vice versa. From my observations, choosing either or does not improve all overlays and which is better depends on the overall postures in both motions and what the particular goal is. I'm assuming in most cases we want the upper body motion to adapt to whatever the lower body is doing so I'm leaving it as is for now. I'll have to look into possible ways to fix what is happening above.

I wanted to implement spatial alignment to solve the twitching problem caused because of the lack of correlation between the upper and lower body. Although it doesn't solve that problem in all cases, here's an example where spatial alignment can alleviate the twitching problem:



Notice that the alignment eliminates the unnecessary lean to the left in the original overlay. However, noise (in the form of very rapid twitching) is prevalent in a lot of the overlays. Perhaps we'll have to look into methods in filtering out the noise to produce better results.

Spatial alignment does not correlate the lower body with the new upper body in all cases. We have a lot of upper body motions that involve a character doing an action while standing. Even with alignment, these upper body motions look awkward when transplanted to a character that's running.

I'm currently working on time aligning the motions before transplanting limbs, although that presents some issues as we may be combining motions where the character is standing, running, or doing some other type of motion. I'm also looking into research for quantifying the naturalness of a motion, which could be useful when generating overlays. Lastly, I'm working on implementing the game environment in OGRE to visualize the overlays on a skinned character.