Relative Importance of Different Body Channels to the Believability of a Stylized 3D Character Animation in a Full Body Shot

Character animation involves movement in different channels of the character’s body. There is a norm in the animation industry that each of these different body channels has varying contributions to the believability of an acting performance: body movement being the highest contributor and lip sync the lowest. This thesis investigated this norm using statistical analysis. While the reduction of body motion caused the biggest drop in believability, similar reductions in facial animation and lip sync have not made a significant effect on the believability. The only exception to the above statement is the animation depicting the emotion sadness, where no significant effect was found for any of the body channels. Also, the emotion anger seems to have an interaction between the participant background and the body channel. Here, the participants from Computer Graphics background gave lower believability ratings compared to the ones without it. To generalize, when it comes to a stylized character animation in a full body shot, it does appear that biggest contributor to the believability is the body motion while it appears that the reduction in facial and lip sync animation does not impact the believability as much as the reduction in body motion