Blending Between Mocap Data and Dynamics

CPSC526 Computer Graphics: Animation (Jan–Apr, 2008)

With Stelian Coros

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Despite significant advances in the area of character animation, the problem of producing high quality, natural-looking, physically-correct motions for agile characters in unpredictable environments is still largely unsolved. Data-driven approaches based on motion capture are great at producing natural-looking motion (provided of course that one can capture motions for the character that is modeled), but do not generalize well for unpredictable environments (having a character react realistically to external pushes or terrain variations for instance). Controller-based methods, on the other hand, excel at generating physically-correct motions that are adapted to the character’s environment.

In this project, we investigated the task of blending between motion capture (mocap) data and Dynamics. To make transitions from dynamics to mocap smooth, we added small external forces in order to match the starting mocap pose.

The Report can be found here.

Videos

(Linked from Stelian's project page)
  • Simple jump
  • Interaction with a car – Mocap data transitioned into Physics, then the character is transitioned back to mocap. The hand of god did play some tricks here thought :).
  • No blend out to mocap – to show what happens without blending out to Mocap.
  • No hand of god – what happens when the twaeks are missing :)