Motion Editing : Mathematical Foundations

Before we can begin tackling motion editing problems in earnest, we must ensure our familiarity with the basic tools we will constantly be using, and with the objects on which the tools will be applied. Our goal is the manipulation of motions performed by 3D computer characters. Most, if not all, of the high-level techniques for editing motions that will be presented later in this course depend heavily on the representations we choose for our character models, their underlying degrees of freedom (DOFs), and the motion curves that define an animation. In this section we will examine our choices for these representations, and also introduce an important algorithm for motion editing, inverse kinematics (IK).