Motion capture systems provide an efficient and interactive solution for extracting information related to a human skeleton, which is often exploited to animate virtual characters. When the character cannot be assimilated to an anthropometric shape, the task to map motion capture data onto the armature to be animated could be extremely challenging. This paper presents two methodologies for the automatic mapping of a human skeleton onto virtual character armatures. Kinematics chains of the human skeleton are analyzed in order to map joints, bones and end-effectors onto an arbitrary shaped armatures. Both forward and inverse kinematics are considered. A prototype implementation has been developed by using the Microsoft Kinect as body tracking device. Results show that the proposed solution can already be used to animate truly different characters ranging from a Pixar-like lamp to different kinds of animals
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