Kinematics, Dynamics, Biomechanics: Evolution of Autonomy in Game Animation
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2005
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing, Inc
Abstract
The believeable portrayal of character performances is critical in engaging the immersed player in interactive entertainment. The story, the emotion and the relationship between the player and the world they are interacting within are hugely dependent on how appropriately the world s characters look, move and behave. We re concerned here with the character s motion; with next generation game consoles like Xbox360TM and Playstation the graphical representation of characters will take a major step forward which places even more emphasis on the motion of the character. The behavior of the character is driven by story and design which are adapted to game context by the game s AI system. The motion of the characters populating the game s world, however, is evolving to an interesting blend of kinematics, dynamics, biomechanics and AI drivenmotion planning.Our goal here is to present the technologies involved in creating what are essentially character automata, emotionless and largely brainless character shells that nevertheless exhibit enough "behavior" to move as directed while adapting to the environment through sensing and actuating responses. This abstracts the complexities of low level motion control, dynamics, collision detection etc. and allows the game s artificial intelligence system to direct these characters at a higher level.While much research has already been conducted in this area and some great results have been published, we will present the particular issues that face game developers working on current and next generation consoles, and how these technologies may be integrated into game production pipelines so to facilitate the creation of character performances in games. The challenges posed by the limited memory and CPU bandwidth (though this is changing somewhat with next generation) and the challenges of integrating these solutions with current game design approaches leads to some interesting problems, some of which the industry has solutions for and some others which still remain largely unsolved.
Description
@article{10.1111:j.1467-8659.2005.00847.x,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Kinematics, Dynamics, Biomechanics: Evolution of Autonomy in Game Animation}},
author = {Collins, Steve},
year = {2005},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing, Inc},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/j.1467-8659.2005.00847.x}
}