2005 IRISH SCIENTIST YEAR BOOK

Home Page

Table of contents

Index by Author

Index by topics

Search


Letterkenny Institute of Technology
Mark Leeney & Darragh Maloney
Realtime animation in LYIT

Researcher Darragh Maloney, based at Letterkenny Institute of Technology, working in conjunction with computer games company Torc Interactive, based in Muff, Co.Donegal, and under the direction of Dr Mark Leeney (LYIT) and John O'Kane (Torc), has begun investigating methods of producing animations in realtime. Deriving from work done by Witkin and Popovic, Tak and Ko, and others, this work will attempt to reduce the large manual input required of expert animators to produce new animations from a set of basic motions.


Until now a huge effort was required to produce new animations. The goal of this research is to develop ways of using a library of motions to produce completely new animations, using warping, inverse kinematics and interpolation, without the time-consuming and intricate animator input required to constrain the motion in space and time to produce realistic articulated figure motion. Also, multiresolution techniques in warping will be considered for the first time.

Due to the large number of degrees of freedom in a realistic humanoid skeleton it is a real challenge to manage such complexity in realtime. While the goal is to produce methods that run in realtime, it is recognised that some may need to be done offline. However, any automatic methods for producing new motions are to be welcomed as traditionally animating motions has been extremely expensive in terms of time and resources.

This research is funded by a grant from Enterprise Ireland and Torc Interactive.

Contact: Dr Mark Leeney,
Department of Computing, Letterkenny Institute of Technology,
Port Road, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal;
E-mail: [email protected]