TOWARDS GENERALISED MOTION DYNAMICS FOR ANIMATION

Abstract

Dynamic simulation has the advantage that the motion is produced from a model of the real world. However, including such physical descriptions in an animation system in a general way is difficult due to the problem of describing the simulation in high level terms. The lowest level primitives are forces, torques and masses and a set of differential equations that relate these primitives to the motion. We describe here an approach to integrating a high level set of primitives into a general purpose animation system via an intermediate language called CHARLI. Interactive user interfaces can be built on top of CHARLI to allow a user to specify motion dynamics for a fairly complex set of interacting bodies.