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Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering From the 2000 NAE Symposium on Frontiers in Engineering (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Physically Based Animation
Pages 23-29

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From page 25...
... and might result in only a couple dozen control knobs. However, a character that needs to convey real emotional content typically will have hundreds of control knobs, allowing the animator to delicately manipulate facial features, breathing, fingers, and the like.
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From page 26...
... (And walking is, indeed, amazingly complex, both as a movement and as a way of conveying an emotional state a character's walk can easily convey that he or she is happy, tired, scared, hurt, confused, and so forth.) Early on, it became obvious that merely running a physical simulation of a system and using the result as animation resulted in "inanimate animation." That is, if you want to produce animation of models or objects that need to seem "alive," then the control aspect of your model is as important (or perhaps even more important)
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From page 27...
... 27 o 1 C ~ .- ~ o o ~ .; o O c go o h o ~ O 'A 8 .e o o ~ ~ o ~ C C ~ o o ~ 8 o .- ~ ~ 'a C o O ~ 8 .e
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From page 28...
... At a high enough level, physically based animation can be simply described as follows: starting from a description of a system's initial state, and giving a differential equation describing the behavior of the system, we wish to follow the evolution of the system over time. Equivalently, we are solving an initial-valued differential equation.
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From page 29...
... the desired goal; animation, in the end, exists because of the desire to view the world not as it really is but as the artist chooses it to be. Conformance of a simulation to the animator's world often turns out to be a much harder challenge than conformance to the "real" world.
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Key Terms

  • based animation
  • computer animation
  • realistic animation
  • differential equation
  • initial premise

  • control knobs
  • physical simulation
  • implicitly various
  • animators work
  • initial state

  • engineering activities
  • delicately manipulate
  • key aspect
  • computer interpolates
  • content typically

  • emotional content
  • animation overlooks
  • fruitful niche
  • spline curve
  • animators entirely

  • senior animators
  • difficult research
  • time animating
  • simplistic model
  • junior animators

  • hard trying
  • traditional engineering
  • requisite control
  • inherent computational
  • drawing characters


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