Abstract:

We extend an earlier motion-synthesis algorithm for physically realistic articulated figures in several ways. First, we summarize several incremental improvements to the original algorithm that improve its efficiency significantly and provide the user with some ability to influence what motions are generated. These techniques can be used by an animator to achieve a desired movement style, or they can be used to guarantee variety in the motions synthesized over several runs of the algorithm. Second, we report on new mechanisms that support the concatenation of existing, automatically generated motion controllers to produce complex, composite movement. Finally, we describe initial work on generalizing the techniques from 2D to 3D articulated figures. Taken together, these results illustrate the promise and challenges afforded by the automated motion-synthesis approach to computer animation. Key Words: Animation, spacetime constraints, heuristic methods, machine learning, stochastic optimization, evolutionary computation.