The Effects of Noise on the Perception of Animated Human Running

Cyclic motions such as running or walking are difficult to animate because limitations in time and technology often result in only a small number of distinct cycles being produced. These few cycles are then repeated to create an animation of the desired length. Unfortunately, the repetitiveness of the resulting motion often appears unnatural. This paper seeks to fix this problem by determining how to introduce natural-looking variability into cyclic animations of human motion. We construct a noise function based on biomechanical considerations that introduces natural-looking perturbations in a base running motion produced either by dynamic simulation or from motion capture data. We evaluate our results through human subject testing.