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In Proceedings of Symposium on Computer Animation

Animating articulated characters using wiggly splines

Christian Schulz, Christoph von Tycowicz, Hans-Peter Seidel, and Klaus Hildebrandt

Our framework for spacetime optimization efficiently generates planned motion of complex articulated characters. Snapshots of an animation of a four-legged character performing a handstand followed by a twisting jump are shown.

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We propose a new framework for spacetime optimization that can generate artistic motion with a long planning horizon for complex virtual characters. The scheme can be used for generating general types of motion and neither requires motion capture data nor an initial motion that satisfies the constraints. Our modeling of the spacetime optimization combines linearized dynamics and a novel warping scheme for articulated characters. We show that the optimal motions can be described using a combination of vibration modes, wiggly splines, and our warping scheme. This enables us to restrict the optimization to low-dimensional spaces of explicitly parametrized motions. Thereby the computation of an optimal motion is reduced to a low-dimensional non-linear least squares problem, which can be solved with standard solvers. We show examples of motions created by specifying only a few constraints for positions and velocities.

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Christian Schulz, Christoph von Tycowicz, Hans-Peter Seidel, and Klaus Hildebrandt, Animating articulated characters using wiggly splines, In Proceedings of Symposium on Computer Animation, pp. 101–109, 2015.

BibTex 

@inproceedings{bib:schulz:2015,
    author       = { Schulz, Christian and Tycowicz, Christoph von and Seidel, Hans-Peter and Hildebrandt, Klaus },    
    title        = { Animating articulated characters using wiggly splines },
    booktitle    = { In Proceedings of Symposium on Computer Animation },
    year         = { 2015 },
    pages        = { 101--109 },
    doi          = { 10.1145/2786784.2786799 },
    dblp         = { conf/sca/0004TSH15 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/256 },
}