An animation database is a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

which stores fragments of

animations Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...

or human movements and which can be accessed, analyzed and queried to develop and assemble new animations.S. Kuroki, "Walkthrough using Animation database MOVE" in ''Database and expert systems applications, Volume 4'' edited by Vladimír Marík, 1994 pages 760-763Kaoru Sumi "Interactive Storytelling System Using Recycle-Based Story Knowledge" in ''Interactive Storytelling: Second Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2009'' by Ido A. Iurgel 2009 pages 74-8

/ref> Given that the manual generation of a large amount of animation can be time consuming and expensive, an animation database can assist users in building animations by using existing components, and sharing animation fragments. Early examples of animation databases include the system MOVE which used an object oriented database. Modern animation databases can be populated via the extraction of

skeletal animation Skeletal animation or rigging is a technique in computer animation in which a character (or other articulated object) is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called the ''mesh'' or ''skin'') and a hierarc ...

s from motion capture data.G. Rogez, "Exploiting Spatio-temporal constraints for Robust 2D Pose Tracking" in ''Human Motion: Understanding, Modeling, Capture and Animation'': HumanMotion 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 20, 2007 ISBN pages58-7

/ref> Other examples include

crowd simulation Crowd simulation is the process of simulating the movement (or ) of a large number of entities or characters. It is commonly used to create virtual scenes for visual media like films and video games, and is also used in crisis training, architect ...

in which a number of people are simulated as a crowd. Given that in some applications the people need to be walking at different speeds, say on a sidewalk, the animation database can be used to retrieve and merge different animated figures.''Crowd simulation'' by Daniel Thalmann, Soraia Raupp Musse 2007 pages 59-6

/ref> The method is mainly known as "motion graphs".''Motion Graphs'' by Michael Gleicher, 2008, Published in ''Proceeding SIGGRAPH '08 ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 classes''

/ref> Animation databases can also be used for "interactive storytelling" in which fragments of animations are retrieved from the animation database and are ''recycled'' to combine into new stories. For instance, the animation database called ''Animebase'' is used within the system ''Words Anime'' to help generate animations using recycled components. In this approach, the user may input words which form parts of a story and queries against the database help select suitable animation fragments. This type of system may indeed use two databases: an animation database, as well as a story knowledge database. The story knowledge database may use subjects, predicates and objects to refer to story fragments. The system then assists the user in matching between story fragments and animation fragments. Animation databases can also be used for the generation of visual scenes using humanoid models.Takaya Yuizona et al. "Cognitive Development Environment of Sign Language Animation System Using Humanoid Model" in ''Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information Engineering Systems'' by Ernesto Damiani 2002 page

/ref> An example application has been the development of an animated humanoid-based

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign l ...

system to help the disabled. Another application of an animation database is in the synthesis of ''idle motion'' for human characters.Arjan Egges et al "Personalized Real-time Idle Motion Synthesis" in the ''Proceedings of the 12th Pacific Graphics Conference'', pages 121–130, October 2004 Human beings move all the time and in unique ways, and the presentation of a consistent and realistic set of idle motions for each character between different animation segments has been a challenge, e.g. each person has a unique way of standing and this needs to be represented in a realistic way throughout an animation. One of the problems is that idle motion affects all joints and simply showing statistical movements at each joint results in less than realistic portrayals. One approach to solving this problem is to use an animation database with a large set of pre-recorded human movements, and obtain the suitable patterns of motion from the database through statistical analysis.

References

{{Animation Animation Types of databases