Research On Skeletal Animation Based On Kinect

Skeletal Animation is an important technology in gaming and animation industry. It’s aprocess of building a set of interconnected bones, binding with vertices of a mesh to the bones,and then animating the skeleton. Then capture the poses of the skeleton in keyframes,calculate the inserted frames and drive the mesh to produce animation. The skeleton of themesh would not display in the scene, just used to drive the motion of the characterconsistently.The capture of skeleton pose in keyframes is done by motion capture technique. The oldway of motion capture system has some disadvantages such as high cost of cameras, longproducing cycle, difficult to set up, and the need of large private shooting space. Thustraditional motion capture system doesn’t fit the need of low cost animation and gamingproduction. However, with the continuous development of gaming and animation industry inrecent years a lot of small and medium-sized companies were founded. Then the need of lowcost skeleton animation producing is growing day by day. The traditional motion capturesystem cannot solve this problem. Thus, some people began to study using Kinect to build askeletal animation system. However, the current related articles and products can only drivethe skinned meshes which are created exclusively based on the Kinect default skeletonhierarchy. Moreover, there is no paper gives detail of how to do the conversion of bonerotation data from the Kinect camera coordinate system to the world coordinate system ofDirect3D.This article designs and implements a skeleton animation system using Kinect, which cansolve the problem. It makes use of a self-designed3d engine and the motion sensing inputdevices Kinect, which was developed by Microsoft. This system can achieve fast producing ofreal time skeleton animation without the need of preset.