Efficient animation techniques balancing both user control and physical realism
Zicheng Liu · 1996
Specifying the motion of an animated linked figure such that it achieves given tasks (e.g., throwing a ball into a basket) and performing the tasks in a realistic fashion (e.g., gracefully, and following physical laws such as gravity) has been an elusive goal for computer animators. The spacetime constraints paradigm has been shown to be a valuable approach to this problem, but it suffers from the computational complexity growth as creatures and tasks approach those one would like to animate. There are two sources which contribute to the complexity problem: one is the symbolic processing of the animator's constraints and the objective functions derived from the physical models and the second lies in the numerical optimization phase. This thesis reports on work to enhance the spacetime constraints techniques both symbolically and numerically to significantly speed up computations. Our first contribution is to develop a new symbolic interface with a recursive evaluation scheme so that th...