Physicists Discover Universal "Wet-Dog Shake" Rule

Dog owners can sleep easy tonight because physicists have discovered how rapidly a wet dog should oscillate its body to dry its fur. Presumably, dogs already know. From the article: "Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of Andrew Dickerson at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a few buddies. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. Dickerson and co filmed a number of dogs shaking their fur and used the images to measure the period of oscillation of the dogs' skin. For a labrador retriever, this turns out to be 4.3 Hz."

Comments

Before sarcasm is toted around here...

[Anonymous Coward]

The formula is significant for us in the ad/entertainment industry who relies on algorithms to animate such motions. It sure beats trying to manually animating each fur (impossible), or coming up with a workaround that only approximates reality through trial and error. This will significantly reduce render times.

The same could be said about fluid dynamics a decade ago - now we can create whole above/underwater environments within the computer - saving time and cost of flooding entire soundstages.

Re:Before sarcasm is toted around here...

[tacktick]

Or you could just film a real dog or two that is similar to what you are animating. The "researchers" didnt even come up with a good formula for predicting it based on dog size. Probably because it varies for different breeds and what doggie chow he eats.

Not yet...

[Ecuador]

Ok, FTFA, it seems that the researchers did a very simplistic model and then found some videos so that they can measure what the animals actually do and noticed that they did not fit their model. So, nothing to see here until someone really sits down and models the wet dog oscillations with accuracy and tell us what the optimal frequency is (so that we can teach our dog if it is not that good with drying of course!).