Computer Animation of Vertebratea

Jaroslav Semančík, Josef Pelikán, Jiří Žára

We investigate computer animation of human body or body of other vertebratea (horse, dog, cat). Our primary area of interest is synthesis of realistic motion of a character. The motion is generated using a library of example movements obtained by motion capture. Several variations of each movement are stored in the library. New variations can be created then by interpolation of the examples for given parameters of the movement variation to create. Thus a human motion adapted to a virtual terrain and user control is generated.

We deal with several problems, e.g. interpolation of movement variations, registration of them for motion blending, transitions between successive generated movements or choice of representative examples in the library to provide a wide range of movement variations with minimal interpolation error.

The method is especially suitable to produce realistic motion of avatars in interactive virtual environments and video-games due to its very high run-time performance.

Keywords: character animation, motion capture, motion library, motion blending parametric motion model, forward and inverse kinematics

Information Resources

Results

Interactive Synthesis of Constrained Motion from Example Movements

A paper accepted for publication to IASTED VIIP 2004, Marbella, Spain and the respective presentation slides in PDF and HTML format.

Abstract. We present a technique for interactive synthesis of a continuous human motion specified by given constraints (e.g. footprints positions) using a library of example movements. The library contains basic movements (e.g step, jump, kick) obtained by motion capture. Several variations of each movement are captured for different parameter values (e.g. steps of various lengths and heights). Then the movements for any parameter values resulting from the constraints are created as a multidimensional scattered interpolation of examples in parameter space. Smooth transitions between successive interpolated movements are performed to yield a seamless continuous motion. The method is very flexible and it runs in extremely high performance appropriate for time-critical interactive applications like video-games. We demonstrate it on a human walking with variable step length by our implementation.

Keywords: human figure animation, motion library, multidimensional interpolation, motion capture, motion blending

Synthesised walk on a ladder.