Procedural Motion Control Techniques

Computer animation of human figures poses a major challenge because of the many degrees of freedom involved and the range of possible human movement. Traditional techniques such as keyframing only provide support at a low level - the animator tediously specifies and controls motion in terms of joint angles or coordinates for each degree of freedom. We propose the use of higher level techniques called procedural control, where knowledge about particular motions or motion processing aspects are directly incorporated into the control algorithm. Two types of procedural control are introduced: motion generation and motion modification tools. To demonstrate the power of procedural motion generation, we have developed a system based on knowledge of human walking and running to animate a variety of human locomotion styles. In order to show the usefulness of procedural motion modification, several techniques from the image and signal processing domain have been "proceduralized" and applied to motion parameters. We have successfully implemented motion multiresolution filtering, multitarget motion interpolation with dynamic timewarping, waveshaping and motion displacement mapping.