Principles and Observation: How Do People Move?

Abstract

The study on human movements and animal locomotion has revealed various principles based on physics, biomechanics, physiology, and psychology. Many of existing animation techniques rely on those principles, which may be described as a form of mathematical equations, rules, procedures, or algorithms. Another stream of research, called data-driven animation, made use of human motion data captured from live actors. In this talk, we argue that these two approaches are complementary to each other. We observed that physics-based methods and data-driven methods may combine in several different ways. The combination opens up new possibilities in character animation.