Carpet unrolling for character control on uneven terrain

Miller, Mark; Holden, Daniel; Al-Ashqar, Rami; Dubach, Christophe; Mitchell, Kenny; Komura, Taku

Abstract

We propose a type of relationship descriptor based on carpet unrolling that computes the joint positions of a character based on the sum of relative vectors originating from a local coordinate system embedded on the surface of a carpet. Given a terrain that a character is to walk over, the carpet is unrolled over the surface of the terrain. The carpet adapts to the geometry of the terrain and curves according to the trajectory of the character. Because trajectories of the body parts are computed as a weighted sum of the relative vectors, the character can smoothly adapt to the elevation of the terrain and the horizontal curves of the carpet. The carpet relationship descriptors are easy to parallelize and hundreds of characters can be animated in real-time by making use of the GPUs. This makes it applicable to real-time applications such as computer games.

Citation

Miller, M., Holden, D., Al-Ashqar, R., Dubach, C., Mitchell, K., & Komura, T. (2015, November). Carpet unrolling for character control on uneven terrain. Presented at MIG '15 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: MIG '15 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games
• Start Date: Nov 16, 2015
• End Date: Nov 18, 2015
• Acceptance Date: Aug 1, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Nov 16, 2015
• Publication Date: Nov 16, 2015
• Deposit Date: Dec 12, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 14, 2017
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Book Title: MIG '15 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games
• Chapter Number: n/a
• ISBN: 9781450339919
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2822013.2822031
• Keywords: locomotion, relationship descriptors, animation, character animation, video games, computer games
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/951577
• Contract Date: Dec 12, 2017