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UCLA Adds Physics to Prat-falls
BaltoAaron writes "CNN.com is reporting on Petros Faloutsos , a UCLA scientist, that has developed a program that creates animation based almost solely on physics. Faloutsos "believes his animation program will one day allow virtual stunt artists to replace their flesh-and-blood counterparts in performing otherwise deadly feats of derring-do." "It's the Holy Grail of character animation. Everybody wants to do it, but there's not a whole lot of it out there right now.""
DANCE is a portable, open, plug-in based, object-oriented software package for physics-based character animation. It runs on Linux, Irix, Windows 98/NT and is being ported to MacOS by Joe Laszlo. One of its goals is to provide researchers with a common platform where they can test their control methods and share their results. In addition, it provides the common, yet complex functionality that everyone needs in a physics-based animation system, allowing researchers to concentrate on their research work. Dance has been used for a variety of physics-based applications that include biomechanics modelling and composeable controllers. For more information, please contact the authors.
It's available to download and play with!
Physics-based animation has been a hot topic in computer graphics for a decade. SIGGRAPH made a major award to Prof. Andy Witkin of Carnige Mellon in 2001 for major progress in this field. This involves anmal motions, objects colliding, objects shattering (e.g. Phantom Menace) and so on.
Every computer generted graphic movie thus far has failed
Uh... Toy Story I/II, Bugs Life, Monster's Inc, Shrek, Antz (which I think sucked but did good business)... I wouldn't exactly call them failures.
Sorry, but you are not very clued in on the
research. Petros did not make a physical
simulation of a human walking. That had been
done many years earlier. Researchers at
Georgia Tech [Hodgins, et al.] and U Penn
[Badler, et al.] have focused on simulated
humans since the early 90's, simulating motions
from running to bicycling to diving.
Petros's work was on integrating these motions
together: so a character could walk, trip,
dive, land, roll, and stand back up again.
He used support vector machines to learn
the domains of acceptable pre- and post-
conditions of different movements and plan
the transitions.