Sketching 3D Animation

This thesis presents a method for creating natural 3D animation based on sketches. Our method provides novice and professional sketchers an easy, fast, and intuitive way to create three dimensional animations by drawing sketches, enhanced by strokes, and joint trajectory or rotation curves. It also allows searching massive databases of 3D animation as an application for motion capture system and major animation software. We extract 2D skeletons from strokes and find similar motion sequences by comparing all the important pre-generated key poses in database. To give the system more hints, users can draw joint trajectory and rotations curves that are similar to traditional motion sketches. The curves will be compared with the motion sequences that are found. The system supports graphical interfaces that are able to select the motion sequence candidates, to allow for changes in the range of the motion sequence, and to merge the final animation. The proposed system gives a solution for creating natural 3D motions from simple 2D sketches