Adopting Procedural Animation Technology to Generate Locomotion of Quadruped Characters in Dynamic Environments

A procedural-animation-based approach which rapidly synthesize the adaptive locomotion for quadruped characters that they can walk or run in any directions on an uneven terrain within a dynamic environment was proposed. We devise practical motion models of the quadruped animals for adapting to a varied terrain in a real-time manner. While synthesizing locomotion, we choose the corresponding motion models by means of the footstep prediction of the current state in the dynamic environment, adjust the key-frames of the motion models relying on the terrain-s attributes, calculate the collision-free legs- trajectories, and interpolate the key-frames according to the legs- trajectories. Finally, we apply dynamic time warping to each part of motion for seamlessly concatenating all desired transition motions to complete the whole locomotion. We reduce the time cost of producing the locomotion and takes virtual characters to fit in with dynamic environments no matter when the environments are changed by users.

Authors:

• Zongyou He
• Bashu Tsai
• Chinhung Ko
• Tainchi Lu

Keywords:

• Dynamic environment
• motion synthesis
• procedural animation
• quadruped locomotion

References:

[1] Z.H. Liang and T. Y. Li "Simulating Human Low-Posture Motions with
Procedural Animation," Proceedings of Computer Graphics Workshop,
Taiwan, 2007.
[2] Jehee Lee, Jinxiang Chai, Paul S. A. Reitsma, Jessica Kate Hodgins, and
Nancy S. Pollard, "Interactive control of avatars animated with human
motion data," Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer
graphics and interactive techniques, pp. 491-500, 2002.
[3] Lucas Kovar and Michael Gleicher, "Automated extraction and
parameterization of motions in large data sets," ACM Transactions on
Graphics (TOG), Vol. 23, Issue3, 2004.
[4] Rune Skovbo Johansen, "Automated SemiÔÇÉ Procedural Animation for
Character Locomotion," Proceedings of Game Developers Conference,
2009.
[5] Eamonn Keogh and Chotirat Ann Ratanamahatana, "Exact indexing of
dynamic time warping," Proceedings of the 28th International
Conference on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 406-417, 2002.
[6] Rachel Heck, Lucas Kovar, and Michael Gleicher, "Splicing Upper-Body
Actions with Locomotion," ACM SIGGRAPH posters, 2007.
[7] Sang Il Park, Hyun Joon Shin, and Sung Yong Shin, "On-line locomotion
generation based on motion blending," Proceedings of the 2002 ACM
SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, pp.
105-111, 2002.
[8] Min Gyu Choi, Jehee Lee and Sung Yong Shin, "Planning biped
locomotion using motion capture data and probabilistic roadmaps," ACM
Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Vol. 22, Issue 2, pp. 182-203, 2003.
[9] Jaroslav Semancik, Josef Pelikan, and Jiff Zara, "Interactive synthesis of
constrained motion from example movements." Proceedings of the 4th
IASTED International Conference on Visualization, Imaging, and Image,
pp. 878-883, 2004.
[10] Stelian Coros, Andrej Karpathy, Ben Jones, Lionel Reveret, and Michael
van de Panne, "Locomotion skills for simulated Quadrupeds," ACM
Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Vol. 30, Issue 4, 2011.