Animation recipes: turning an animator's trick into an automatic animation system

With a traditional key frame animation system, animators author a tremendous number of key frames across many animation variables (avars) manually. In particular, with cycles or ambient body motion, animators have a simple but powerful trick to avoid having to do this. They hand animate the avar that is driving the motion, then duplicate and transform the motion on that avar to other detailed avars throughout the body. We have generalized this trick into a system that turns rough blocking, done with a minimum number of avars, into fully detailed animation with the click of a button.