Splicing Upper-Body Actions with Locomotion

This paper presents a simple and efficient technique for synthesizing high-fidelity motions by attaching, or splicing, the upper-body action of one motion example to the lower-body locomotion of another. Existing splicing algorithms do little more than copy degrees of freedom (DOFs) from one motion onto another. This naïve DOF replacement can produce unrealistic results because it ignores both physical and stylistic correlations between various joints in the body. Our approach uses spatial and temporal relationships found within the example motions to retain the overall posture of the upper-body action while adding secondary motion details appropriate to the timing and configuration of the lower body. By decoupling upper-body action from lower-body locomotion, our motion synthesis technique allows example motions to be captured independently and later combined to create new natural looking motions.