Spacetime constraints revisited

Abstract
The Spacetime Constraints (SC) paradigm, whereby the animator specifies what an animated figure should do but not how to do it,is a very appealing approach to animation. However, the algorithms available for realizing the SC approach are limited. Curren t tech- niques are local in nature: they all use some kind of perturba tional analysis to refine an initial trajectory. We propose a global search algorithm that is capable of generating multiple novel traj ectories for SC problems from scratch. The key elements of our search strategy are a method for encoding trajectories as behavior s, and a genetic search algorithm for choosing behavior parameters that is currently implemented on a massively parallel computer. We de- scribe the algorithm and show computed solutions to SC problems for 2D articulated figures.

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