Answer

Introduction

Human figure animation has long been an important and challenging area in computer graphics.
The reasons for this are two-fold. First, the human figure is very complex and no current model comes
even close to its true nature. Second, is that our eyes are sensitive to human figures that we can easily
identify unrealistic body shapes or body motions. Today, many fields use human figure animation in
action such as films, video games, virtual reality, television, ergonomics, and soon on. The type of action
determines the complexity of the model's animation. For example, if the video game is third person, and
the player rotates the camera around they will see the walk or run cycle from a completely new angle.
This new angle can reveal things like knee pops that might not be visible in normal camera views. These
are the considerations a game animator must make to ensure that their animation can withstand
whatever the player throws at it. Unlike animation in a movie, where the animator doesn't have to care
about how it looks from the side or back, game animations must appear beautiful from every
perspective. However, for biomedical research, realism is necessary and the human animated model
should obey physical laws. So, the human models are animated and designed according to the specific
area in which they are applied. In this paper, I will summarize the methods on human figure animation
and describe the methods and results of various aspects in more detail.

Methods of the human figure animation

During the first-generation purely geometric models, a motion was developed using forward and
inverse kinematic techniques. Kinematic techniques are deal with the geometry of motion regardless of
its physical realization, in other words, is concerned with the velocity, position, and acceleration of the
body. These techniques use biomechanical knowledge of human motion in order to compute realistic
motions. Firstly, forward kinematics is the positioning of a point by traversing the joint angle rotation
and segment length matrices from some root node outward to the leaves of the body tree. In forward
kinematics methods, the animator must specify all the parameters for the degree of rotation and their
order for each joint in the hierarchy, to move the limb from point Z to point Y in the 3D workspace. This
is a tedious task for an animator because the angle of each joint must be tweaked to ensure the
accurate placement of the arm. Next, inverse kinematics is a higher-level approach. It is sometimes
called “goal-directed motion.” Given the positions of end-effectors only, inverse kinematics solves the
position and orientation of all the joints in the hierarchy. In inverse kinematics methods, the animator
simply specifies the final desired position of the limb using an end-effector, and all the joints rotation is
calculated automatically to place them at the desired location. With inverse kinematics move the last
child in the hierarchy and all its parent joints will rotate, in Inverse motion or kinematics. The inverse
kinematics system in contrast to forward kinematics uses a much more direct approach in this case.

Dynamic approaches are an obvious way to normalize natural motion is to use our knowledge of
the dynamics of physical objects. They must obey Newton's laws of motion. While it is straightforward to
model the motion of simple solids in frictionless space, the dynamics of articulated structures with the
complexity of the human body are less simple. The biggest challenge with this approach is finding
intuitive ways to specify and control motion, as it requires knowledge of joint torques and external
reaction forces to solve dynamic equations and generate animations. Joint torque is produced by human
muscles and is usually under voluntary control. For a moving human subject, these joint torques are
agnostic in the real sense, although methods exist to estimate them. Although it is difficult to estimate
parameters and torque, this approach is very attractive because the resulting motion will have some
natural qualities even if the estimates are inaccurate.

Motion capture refers to a set of technologies that record the movements of people and objects
and transmit the corresponding data to another application. It has been used for a variety of purposes,
from sports therapy, farming, movies, and games. Motion capture enables life-like dynamics in virtual
environments by mapping real-world motion onto computer-generated frames. Typically, motion
capture uses magnetic systems or optical systems to record the movements of real people in 3D. This
data, usually from a database, is then used to animate virtual characters. Optical system, actors wear
specially designed suits that are covered with reflectors placed at major joints. High-resolution cameras
are then strategically positioned to track these reflectors during the actor's movement. Each camera
generates 2D coordinates for each reflector, obtained through a segmentation step. The data captured
by all cameras is then analyzed using proprietary software to calculate the 3D coordinates of the
reflector. These systems are the most expensive on the market due to their cutting-edge technological
nature, such as high-resolution cameras and complex proprietary software. Next, magnetic system is
using a set of receivers placed in the actor's joints, the position and orientation of the joints relative to
the antenna can be measured. Magnetic systems are not very expensive compared to other systems
used for motion capture. Workstations for data acquisition and processing are inexpensive and have
high data accuracy. With a typical sampling rate of 100 frames per second, the magnetic system is ideal
for simple motion capture.

Result

Methods Advantages Disadvantages

Kinematic - Provides realistic movements. - High complexity and cost of
Techniques computation.

- High technical requirements for

animators.

Dynamic - No other equipment necessary. - Very complex tasks specification and

Techniques solution of equations of motion.

- Time sequence of controlling

torques more accurate

Motion Caption - Close to real-time, low latency - Specific hardware and special programs
Techniques and capturing moves are more are required to acquire and process data.
realistic.

- The workload does not vary

with the complexity or length of
the performance as it does with
traditional techniques.
 Even though the quality of the animations produced by kinematic techniques is provided
realistic movement, the quality of the resulting sequences depends on the animator's technical skills.
One of the problems with kinematic techniques is how to determine a sequence of positions that
produces realistic animation. The basic alternative is to either obtain data from real-world experiments
like movie analysis or find them by error, both of which can be very tedious and therefore unacceptable
in some cases. Therefore, the animator of such techniques must modify the trajectory parameters and
interpolate weights through trial and error to produce the specific desired motion. But, dynamic
techniques can avoid these limitations and no other equipment is required. The main advantage of
dynamics techniques is that given the time sequence of control torques and forces the predicted motion
is more accurate for specified conditions and will occur under those conditions in the real world. This
means that the results of dynamic simulations can be used as the basis for excellent animations,
automatically taking into account reactions to external and internal constraints such as collisions, fields,
forces and torques. Compared to kinematic techniques and dynamic techniques, motion caption
techniques offer the benefits of using intrinsically realistic motion to animate human-like figures and the
workload does not vary with the complexity or length of the performance as it does with traditional
techniques. Moreover, this technique provides animators with tools that are compatible with their usual
work on the key framed or captured trajectory. But this technique is required specific hardware and
special program to obtain and process the data. Due to using the specific hardware and special program,
the cost of the software and program, equipment required can be prohibitive for small productions.

Discussion

As a consequence, researchers in the area of computer graphics and animation of human figures should
start thinking of possibilities that would begin from the very top level, and for overcoming specific
problems of a certain level, to direct the model towards integrating lower levels. For example, motion
editing techniques would very much be aided by the use of dynamic constraints which in turn would
much be aided by kinematic correction models. It is strongly believed that such a combination of
techniques would solve and overcome most issues for animation.

Discussion of dynamic

Adding biomechanical knowledge concerning human motion to the inverse dynamics module
allows us to guarantee that the computed motion is anatomically feasible. If the forces are properly and
robustly computed, the character may be able to handle interactions with his environment. This may be
essential for animating autonomous actors in virtual reality applications. Collisions with other objects,
walking on a variable terrain, walking in water or against the wind could be simulated using these
methods, offering a powerful tool to animators. However, techniques based on controllers and
dynamics simulation suffer from a high computational cost compared to kinematic techniques. This
makes them difficult to use in interactive animation tools. Moreover, the mechanical parameters are
very difficult to calibrate with respect to human anatomy (damping effects between bones, etc.). In
addition to the calibration of the mechanical model, the 11 designer of such a system has to deal with
the calibration of the controller gains in order to obtain realistic motions. Consequently, resulting
motions are usually not as realistic as those generated by hand using kinematics, which offer direct
control on the effective motion rather than trying to model its causes.

Future Work

Future work could focus on combining all the methods which would solve disadvantages
associated with a particular method if used alone. An interesting approach is to adjust the level of detail
generated by the motion as the character approaches, which can be done by switching from one model
to another. Several challenging problems such as the design of smooth transitions remain to be solved in
this field. Another possibility is to extend animation sequences and animation proxies that appear on
individual frames to create more interesting and complex scenes that manage natural changes over time
for believable crowds. In addition, it is necessary to automatically create a large number of plausible
gaits for crowd simulation. The assessment of human figures is another possible area of research. It can
be done qualitatively with real and simulated video images as well as quantitatively.

Conclusion?

This paper classifies Computer Graphics techniques for the simulation of human locomotion into three
main categories: kinematic animation, dynamically-based animation and motion-data edition. These
categories are identified by the type of knowledge that they use in order to compute realistic motions:
empirical/biomechanical knowledge, dynamics and captured trajectories. Table 1 summarizes the main
advantages and shortcomings of all these techniques. Their development over time shows the evolution
described above. For each kind of approach, table 2 recalls the main problems that the method deals
with and its best suitable type of application.

First, Researchers attempted to reproduce some specific behaviors by providing a way to describe these
effects. This kind of approach requires a low computational cost which depends on the selected
interpolation function. Degrees of freedom are computed separately, as if they were decoupled, which
involves a theoretical computation cost of O(n) if n is the number of degrees of freedom. When taking
constraints on foot/ground contact into account, an additional cost of O(n3 ) is generated by the
required inverse kinematic algorithm. Nevertheless, the quality of the motion mainly depends on the
quality and the quantity of knowledge necessary to reproduce the desired effect. For human
locomotion, the way the angular trajectories change depending on high level parameters (such as
velocity, step length, frequency and height) has to be described \a priori". Thus, the designer generally
has to create a new model from scratch to account for a new effect.

Then, several approaches attempted to improve these models under the hypothesis that dynamics laws
were responsible for much of these effects. Methods producing \dynamically-sound" motions were
developed. Some of them just modify the results of kinematic models. Other methods go further by
directly embedding dynamics in the computation of angular trajectories. Thus, controllers applied to
more or less complex mechanical models have been presented. Nevertheless, for complex models such
as the human body, the computational cost increases in O(n3 ) due to the inversion of large matrices.
Moreover, some of the dynamically-sound motions do not look realistic.

Motion capture systems have been widely used during the last few years for creating new animations of
virtual humans. These approaches assume that realistic motions can be obtained by editing and tuning a
library of motion data. This data is based on captured motion, but may also include articial motions
computed with previous approaches. The computational cost is low (O(n)) because each articulation is
computed separately. Although several convincing animations have been designed using these methods,
the parameter control is not simple: a number of trial and error iterations is often needed before
obtaining the desired result. Moreover, the modications applied to predened trajectories have to be
small in order to ensure that the resulting sequence remains realistic. Problems such as avoiding inter-
penetration of the feet into the ground for edited motions, and ensuring non-sliding contact for the
support leg, are not handled by most of these approaches. We believe that these techniques would lead
to very promising developments if they are coupled with knowledge on human motion and with
dynamically based constraints.

Discussion
However, this does not restrict researchers to using the latter (growing popularity) due to the fact that it
produces realistic results, one of the most valued characteristic

motion capture data is the most common technique in commercial animation because many of the
subtle details of human motion are naturally present in the data regardless of its price.

In addition, motion capture databases are gradually being built and made available to a wider audience.

However, the problems associated with motion capture, prevent it from being the ideal solution for all
applications. It is thus understood that using one model alone would not solve the specific problem and
it is further believed that a combination of the different models from the different levels could solve
particular problems and as a result enhance the creation of autonomous virtual characters capable to
react realistically to their environment. Combining, for example, motion capture and dynamic simulation
is an emerging area under exploration, in order to retain the advantages of each while avoiding their
disadvantages.

That is, information about human motion contained in motion capture data coupled with the physical
realism provided by simulation, could provide controllable and reactive human motion.

the idea of combining more than one of the techniques for human figure animation is not new. It
originates from the innovative idea of Zordan and Hodgins that use forward dynamics and a tracking
controller to follow human motion data i.e. dynamics with motion capture.