A Layered Authoring Tool for Stylized 3D animations

Guided by the 12 principles of animation, stylization is a core 2D animation feature but has been utilized mainly by experienced animators. Although there are tools for stylizing 2D animations, creating stylized 3D animations remains a challenging problem due to the additional spatial dimension and the need for responsive actions like contact and collision. We propose a system that helps users create stylized casual 3D animations. A layered authoring interface is employed to balance between ease of use and expressiveness. Our surface level UI is a timeline sequencer that lets users add preset stylization effects such as squash and stretch and follow through to plain motions. Users can adjust spatial and temporal parameters to fine-tune these stylizations. These edits are propagated to our node-graph-based second level UI, in which the users can create custom stylizations after they are comfortable with the surface level UI. Our system also enables the stylization of interactions among multiple objects like force, energy, and collision. A pilot user study has shown that our fluid layered UI design allows for both ease of use and expressiveness better than existing tools.