The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

We present an intuitive way to create dynamic motions for physically simulated, skeleton-driven deformable characters. The motion of the character is guided by the user interactively through Cartesian space control and a combination of setpoint selection. To make direct manipulation of a physically simulated character intuitive, we present a novel approach to Cartesian space control, in which the user may directly drive the accelerations or velocities of bones in the character using mouse drags and scripted constraints.

To facilitate direct user control, we must solve the fully nonlinear equations of motion at speeds close to real-time. To achieve this fast computation speed, we model the deformable body as a coarse mesh having an embedded fine surface and apply a geometric recursive dynamics algorithm for fast computation and analytic differentiation. These techniques are not sufficient for good performance, however. We present an improved diagonalization method to efficiently handle mesh elements with large deformation and a number of other optimizations that allow us to achieve simulation speeds that approach real-time.

Keywords

skeleton-driven deformable body, interactive control, Cartesian space control, simulation, hybrid dynamics

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Computer Graphics Lab

Text Reference

Junggon Kim and Nancy Pollard, "Interactive Physically-Based Control of Skeleton-Driven Deformable Characters," tech. report CMU-RI-TR-08-11, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, June, 2008

BibTeX Reference

@techreport{Kim_2008_6089,
   author = "Junggon Kim and Nancy Pollard",
   title = "Interactive Physically-Based Control of Skeleton-Driven Deformable Characters",
   booktitle = "",
   institution = "Robotics Institute",
   month = "June",
   year = "2008",
   number= "CMU-RI-TR-08-11",
   address= "Pittsburgh, PA",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu