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Readings / Read0401HackMotion

Animation by Hackery

One method for creating human motion is procedural: you write functions that make the character move like you want them to. Usually, there is nothing principled about this: its pure hackery, an art form just like key framing.

Ken Perlin is a master of this art form. Go to his web page http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/ and try some of the demos. Click on some of the actors and critters (and keep poking around).

What you should do (before class):

• Go to Ken's web page and play with some of the demos.
• If you don't know what Perlin Noise is, find out. There's a lot of info on the web. You don't need to know the details, just a rough idea on what noise is so you can read a paper that uses it.
• Look at one of the papers by Ken on animating characters with noise:
  • Real Time Responsive Animation with Personality (IEEE)
  • Improv: A System for Scripting Interactive Actors in Virtual Worlds (pdf)
• Make a posting to the blog with your thoughts on this.

The discussion for this topic is https://chatter.lss.wisc.edu/spring09/cs838/?q=node/32.

Note: in class, we won't talk about this much, but use it as a building block to talk about other things.