Online real‐time locomotive motion transformation based on biomechanical observations

In the paper, we present an online real‐time method for automatically transforming a basic locomotive motion to a desired motion of the same type, based on biomechanical results. Given an online request for a motion of a certain type with desired moving speed and turning angle, our method first extracts a basic motion of the same type from a motion graph, and then transforms it to achieve the desired moving speed and turning angle by exploiting the following biomechanical observations: contact‐driven center‐of‐mass control, anticipatory reorientation of upper body segments, moving speed adjustment, and whole‐body leaning. Exploiting these observations, we propose a simple but effective method to add physical and behavioral naturalness to the resulting locomotive motions without preprocessing. Through experiments, we show that our method enables a character to respond agilely to online user commands while efficiently generating walking, jogging, and running motions with a compact motion library. Our method can also deal with certain dynamical motions such as forward roll. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.