Sex selection in inheritance based avatar generation

摘要

The generation of characters within computer animations is currently a labor intensive and expensive activity for a wide range of businesses. Whereas prior art approaches have sought to reduce this loading by providing reference avatars, these do not fundamentally overcome the intensive steps in generating these reference avatars, and they provide limited variations. According to the invention a user is provided with a simple and intuitive mechanism to affect the weightings applied in establishing the physical characteristics of an avatar generated using an inheritance based avatar generator. The inheritance based generator allowing, for example, the user to select a first generation of four grandparents, affect the weightings in generating the second generation parents, and affect the weightings in generating the third generation off-spring avatar from these parents. Accordingly the invention provides animators with a means of rapidly generating and refining the off-spring avatar to provide the character for their animated audio-visual content.

主权项

1. A method, comprising:
providing at least two avatars via an avatar generator, each one of the at least two avatars having a different simulated physical appearance that is defined in terms of a plurality of inheritable characteristics; providing a first weighting factor via the avatar generator for defining a relative contribution of at least one of the plurality of inheritable characteristics from each of the at least two avatars to a simulated physical appearance of an Off-Spring avatar, the first weighting factor selected by a user; providing an indication of the sex of the Off-Spring avatar; designating a first inheritable characteristic associated with at least one of the two avatars as being a recessive characteristic, wherein a first avatar of the two avatars is associated with a first recessive variant of the recessive characteristic, a second avatar of the two avatars is associated with a second recessive variant of the recessive characteristic, and the first recessive variant is different than the second recessive variant; providing a second weighting factor via the avatar generator for defining a relative contribution of the first recessive variant and the second recessive variant; generating the Off-Spring avatar in dependence upon the plurality of inheritable characteristics of the at least two avatars, the first weighting factor, the second weighting factor, and the indication of the sex of the Off-Spring avatar; and at least one of storing the Off-Spring avatar on a computer readable storage medium and displaying the simulated physical appearance of the Off-Spring avatar to the user.