Character Simulation

Thoughts

• A lot of work on physically simulated character animation is a bit less…physical…than I would have expected, as many papers focus on matching physical behavior to stylized or motion captured data. I guess the simulation is more of an extra policy to assure physically plausible movement (no intersections, anti-gravity, balancing) on top of art directed movement.
• I do still quite like the classic analytic legged locomotion animation - something about it just seems cute and springy, albeit mechanical and unwavering.
• The more generalized control models for e.g. biped walking involved a lot of classical control theory, which makes sense at a high level but I can’t say I understood all the math.
• The various papers on learned controllers I found most compelling, as they tended to give very organic behaviors that are physically plausible due to the simulation. I really can’t wait until the learning based methods (e.g. phased functioned NNs) make it into interactive applications and games.