Warping the space around an animated object.

The creation of animation clips and the tweaking of existing character animation is often a tedious, time-consuming task, especially in large-scale CG productions. Traditionally these tasks were achieved by animators manually changing multiple keyframe values for all the relevant animation rig controls. Starting with the idea that a single animated object (e.g. a rig control) essentially defines a time-varying curve in 3D space - where the control points are defined by the keyframe values of the translation channels - we introduce a modeling approach for deforming these conceptual 3D curves. We will talk about our current implementation based on FFDs (Free Form Deformations) as described in [Sederberg and Parry 1986], but we strongly believe the same approach can have many other usages (e.g. modeling tools, collisions and obstacle avoidance).