An LMA-Effort simulator with dynamics parameters for motion capture animation

• Published in: Computer animation and virtual worlds Vol. 17; no. 3-4; pp. 167 - 177
• Main Authors: Chao, Shih-Pin, Yang, Shi-Nine, Lin, Tsang-Gang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.07.2006
• Subjects: animation techniques; dynamics-based animation; motion capture and human body simulation; motion control; procedural modeling
• ISSN: 1546-4261; 1546-427X
• DOI: 10.1002/cav.120

This paper presents a dynamics‐based Effort simulator so that a given motion can be modified according to specified Effort qualities. The basic idea of our approach is to establish relations between Effort factors such as Space, Weight, Time, and Flow, and their corresponding dynamics parameters such as force, stiffness, inertia, damping, gravity, and etc in the simulator. Then, a motion with specified Effort quality can be realized by mapping it to appropriate dynamics parameters of the simulator. The proposed simulator has two merits: it is motion capture‐driven, therefore it is able to synthesize motion details and easily to be incorporated into popular motion capture applications. Besides, it is dynamics based and therefore it provides high‐level control intuition of motion dynamics in specifying Effort qualities. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed simulator, several experimental examples are presented and their results are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.