Animating characters using motion capture and simulation

Automatically creating humanlike animation for characters is difficult,
especially in applications such as video games and online environments where
the characters must move realistically, respond to unpredicted events, and
remain controllable at a high level by the users of such virtual worlds.  In
this talk, I describe several techniques for generating realistic character
motion using examples recorded from humans and physically based models,
focusing primarily on controllable, responsive characters that combine dynamic
simulation and recorded data.  My research relies on human examples to dictate
movement style and on simulation to create physically plausible motion
including interactions with the environment and other simulated characters.
Emphasis will be placed on generating believable anticipated and unpredicted
responses within an animation system using both motion capture and simulation
as mechanisms for generating interactive, responsive humanlike motion.


Victor B. Zordan
Assistant Professor
University of California, Riverside
www.cs.ucr.edu/~vbz

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Riverside, Dr.
Victor Zordan received his Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Institute of
Technology in 2002.  Professor Zordan's research interests fall in several
areas of computer animation including human motion, physically based modeling,
interactive virtual environments, behavior control, and interface design.  He
has published numerous papers on the control of human and humanlike characters,
as well as on several other topics including anatomical modeling, procedural
approaches, and video-based animation.