Layered construction for deformable animated characters

  • Authors:
  • J. E. Chadwick;D. R. Haumann;R. E. Parent

  • Affiliations:
  • The Ohio Supercomputer Graphics Project, The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, The Department of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University;The Ohio Supercomputer Graphics Project, The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, The Department of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University;The Ohio Supercomputer Graphics Project, The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, The Department of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University

  • Venue:
  • SIGGRAPH '89 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

A methodology is proposed for creating and animating computer generated characters which combines recent research advances in robotics, physically based modeling and geometric modeling. The control points of geometric modeling deformations are constrained by an underlying articulated robotics skeleton. These deformations are tailored by the animator and act as a muscle layer to provide automatic squash and stretch behavior of the surface geometry. A hierarchy of composite deformations provides the animator with a multi-layered approach to defining both local and global transition of the character's shape. The muscle deformations determine the resulting geometric surface of the character. This approach provides independent representation of articulation from surface geometry, supports higher level motion control based on various computational models, as well as a consistent, uniform character representation which can be tuned and tweaked by the animator to meet very precise expressive qualities. A prototype system (Critter) currently under development demonstrates research results towards layered construction of deformable animated characters.