Motion Synthesis for 3 Articulated Figures and Mass-Spring Models

Abstract

Motion synthesis is the process of automatically generating visually plausible motions that meet goal criteria specified by a human animator. The objects whose motions are synthesized are often animated characters that are modeled as articulated figures or mass-spring lattices. Controller synthesis is a technique for motion synthesis that involves searching in a space of possible controllers to generate appropriate motions. Recently, automatic controller-synthesis techniques for 2D articulated figures have been reported. An open question is whether these techniques can be generalized to work for 3D animated characters. In this paper we report successful automatic controller synthesis for 3D articulated figures and mass-spring models that are subject to nonholonomic constraints. These results show that the 3D motion-synthesis problem can be solved in some challenging cases, though much work on this general topic remains to be done.