Active Animations of Reduced Deformable Models with Environment Interactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient spacetime optimization method for generating realistic animations of deformable bodies interacting with environments, capable of handling complex motions like walking and swimming.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid optimizer for reduced deformable models that enables automatic, long-horizon animation generation with environment interactions.

Findings

Successfully animates complex motions like walking and swimming.

Handles environment interactions such as friction and fluid drag.

Achieves real-time forward simulation with deformable bodies.

Abstract

We present an efficient spacetime optimization method to automatically generate animations for a general volumetric, elastically deformable body. Our approach can model the interactions between the body and the environment and automatically generate active animations. We model the frictional contact forces using contact invariant optimization and the fluid drag forces using a simplified model. To handle complex objects, we use a reduced deformable model and present a novel hybrid optimizer to search for the local minima efficiently. This allows us to use long-horizon motion planning to automatically generate animations such as walking, jumping, swimming, and rolling. We evaluate the approach on different shapes and animations, including deformable body navigation and combining with an open-loop controller for realtime forward simulation.