The Cartoon Animation Filter
Jue Wang, Steve Drucker, Maneesh Agrawala, Michael Cohen
Abstract
We present the ?Cartoon Animation Filter?, a simple filter that takes an arbitrary input motion signal and modulates it in such a way that the output motion is more ?alive? or ?animated?. The filter adds a smoothed, inverted, and (sometimes) time shifted version of the second derivative (the acceleration) of the signal back into the original signal. Almost all parameters of the filter are automated. The user only needs to set the desired strength of the filter. The beauty of the animation filter lies in its simplicity and generality. We apply the filter to motions ranging from hand drawn trajectories, to simple animations within PowerPoint presentations, to motion captured DOF curves, to video segmentation results. Experimental results show that the filtered motion exhibits anticipation, follow-through, exaggeration and squash-and-stretch effects which are not present in the original input motion data.
Left: (a). A simple 1D translational motion on a ball. (b). Filtered motion on the centroid of the ball, the filter adds anticipation and follow-through effects to the motion. (c). By applying the filter on the outline vertices with time shifts, the ball exhibits the squash and stretch effects. Right: Two superimposed frames of a PowerPoint animation after the animation filter is applied. The dotted lines show the original path.