Although the graphic animation industry has developed software with amazing capabilities during the last decades, there are only limited approaches available, which fail to efficiently support the requirements for analyzing and animating dance.
Currently, two basic approaches to 3D character animation exist:
- Motion Capturing is much used in the film industry and requires live actors to perform the actual movement, which is later applied to computer-generated models. Due to immense hardware costs and the unstructured output of movement data, this approach is unsuitable for our project.
- Key Frame Animation, on the other hand, allows for the generation of movement sequences with affordable software. A key frame defines a posture of an animated figure, and the software interpolates the transitions between those key frames, to produce an animated sequence. The popular choreographic software DanceForms, which was influenced in its development by the late American choreographer Merce Cunningham, uses Key Frame Animation.
As movement is only represented by a series of postures, key frame animation is limited in its capabilities to define movement in a comprehensive and refined manner. Key frame animation does not explicitly conceptualize movement. It rather generates movement as an implicit result of positional information.
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