Techniques for interactive manipulation of articulated bodies using dynamic analysis

Manipulating articulated bodies for traditional keyframe computer animation is a laborious task because of the many degrees of freedom, the interaction between segments, and the difficulty of finding and / or constraining local joint positions to specific world space positions or paths . The recursive formulation (by Armstrong) 1 for the dynamics equations for rigid bodies provides a method for dealing with these problems at interactive speeds. Because of complex control issues, dynamics is not yet reasonable for total motion control, but it is a powerful tool for manipulating articulated bodies for keypositioning. This paper describes how dynamic analysis can be used to provide inverse kinematics, directed movement , and kinematic constraints . A system, Manikin, for interactive manipulation of articulated figures using dynamics is described .