Title

Animating Virtual Character Locomotion and Other Oscillatory Motions

Abstract

We present a method for animating locomotion of physically based virtual
characters. The key to our approach is based on the observation that efficient
locomotion should exploit the natural passive response of the character’s
dynamical system.  We specifically focus on the natural vibration modes, which
are affected by parameters such as shape, size, mass, and joint stiffness.
From these modal vibrations we can extract the most promising modes with
respect to locomotion, and combine them with different amplitudes, phases, and
frequencies to animate various gaits.  To create locomotion controllers, the
search for control parameters is reduced since we only need to consider a small
number of modes rather than a large number of degrees of freedom.  This can be
done by optimization, guided by captured motion analysis, but is also easy
enough to do by hand.  Mode shapes are also useful as a low dimensional basis
for interactive puppetry, and may lead to simplifications in the higher level
control of other movements.

Bio

Paul Kry is a new assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at
McGill University.  He has a PhD in computer science from the University of
British Columbia, and was a postdoctoral researcher at INRIA Rhone Alpes and
University Paris 5 before joining McGill.