Rigid Body Animation

CSC 471 Final Project - Winter 2007

Photos          Description         References

 

This is Henry.

He likes to dance.

 

Description

Henry is a hierarchically modeled character using both glu and glut primitives. He is comprised of a body, a head and four appendages. Each appendage has an upper angle and a lower angle. These correspond to either hip/knee angles or shoulder/elbow angles. Each appendage also contains information regarding separate upper and lower transforms and an indication of which axis to rotate about. His arms and legs are cylinders, his body is a cone, his head and hands are spheres, and his feet are squares.

The motion that Henry mastered was simply clapping above his head. This demonstrated rotations about the z axis for both the shoulder and elbow. Next Henry learned how to wave his hands in the air and then how to clap in front of himself. Then Henry learned first dance move, the sprinkler. This was a challenge because the motion of one of the arms is not smooth, but jerky.

 

Next Henry began mixing leg and body movements with arm movements. He started with the running man. This was the simplest, because although his legs move in different directions, all rotations are about the x axis. To make this look more natural, his head and body also slightly move. After some stretching Henry learned to do the splits. His biggest challenge was learning the rodeo. There were two issues that made this the most challenging dance. First, it was difficult to coordinate his along with rotating his arm in order to achieve the correct motion.

 

In addition to the rigid body animation, this project also used some texture mapping, lighting and camera control.

References                                                                                                                                                                           Back To Top

http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/teaching/csc471/material/heirarchy.pdf

Veronica Tufo