We propose a solution to a new problem in animation research: how to use human motion capture data to create character motion with detailed hand gesticulation without the need for the simultaneous capture of hands and the full body. Occlusion and a difference in scale make it difficult to capture both the detail of the hand movement and unrestricted full body motion at the same time. With our method, the two can be captured separately and spliced together seamlessly with little or no user input required (see Figure 1). In addition, we provide an easy method for supplying user input for situations where an animator wants to control the timing of the integrated animation.

To accomplish our goal, we propose a novel distance metric based on research on human gesticulation that is applied along with dynamic time warping (DTW) to align motions with significant timing and amplitude differences (for details on DTW see [Keogh and Ratanamahatana 2005]). Such differences arise when the motions are performed at different speeds or with amplitude variations, for example, a performer extending her arm further in one performance over another. Our use of DTW for such a task is novel because, although DTW has been introduced to the graphics community previously for temporal alignment, the extreme amplitude differences seen between performances in our case have not been addressed in previous work.