The step space: example-based footprint-driven motion synthesis

Especially in a constrained virtual environment, precise control of foot placement during character locomotion is crucial to avoid collisions and to ensure a natural locomotion. In this paper, we present the step space: a novel technique for generating animations of a character walking over a set of desired foot steps in real-time. We use an efficient greedy nearest-neighbor approach and warp the resulting animation such that it adheres to both spatial and temporal constraints. We use smart aligning and inverse kinematics to ensure spatial constraints and time warping for temporal constraints. We will show that our technique can generate realistic locomotion animations very efficiently even though we impose many constraints on the animation. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.