Ultrafast and Controllable Online Motion Retargeting for Game Scenarios

Geometry-aware online motion retargeting is crucial for real-time character animation in gaming and virtual reality. However, existing methods often rely on complex optimization procedures or deep neural networks, which constrain their applicability in real-time scenarios. Moreover, they offer limited control over fine-grained motion details involved in character interactions, resulting in less realistic outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel optimization framework for ultrafast, lightweight motion retargeting with joint-level control (i.e., controls over joint position, bone orientation, etc,). Our approach introduces a semantic-aware objective grounded in a spherical geometry representation, coupled with a bone-length-preserving algorithm that iteratively solves this objective. This formulation preserves spatial relationships among spheres, thereby maintaining motion semantics, mitigating interpenetration, and ensuring contact. It is lightweight and computationally efficient, making it particularly suitable for time-critical real-time deployment scenarios. Additionally, we incorporate a heuristic optimization strategy that enables rapid convergence and precise joint-level control. We evaluate our method against state-of-the-art approaches on the Mixamo dataset, and experimental results demonstrate that it achieves comparable performance while delivering an order-of-magnitude speedup.