Adaptive dynamics of articulated bodies: implementation details

Figure 1: Adaptive dynamics of articulated characters. In this complex scene, 200 human characters, represented by 17,800 rigid bodies and 19,000 degrees of freedom, are suddenly pushed away from the camera due to applied forces. Our adaptive dynamics algorithm allows an animator to progressively reduce the number of simulated joints in the characters as their distance to the camera increases, while automatically determining which joints should be animated to best approximate the characters motion. Depending on the total amount of simplification specified by the animator, a potentially significant speed-up can be achieved over typical linear-time forward dynamics algorithms.