Disk Generators for a Raster Display Device

A simple modification of Horn\u27s circle drawing procedure yields a disk generator for a class of graphic devices capable of drawing rectangular areas. Another variation produces a disk a scan-line at a time allowing it to be drawn at the refresh rate of the display. The calculations involve only additions and binary shifts

Animation 2000++

In the next millennium, computer animation will be both the same as now and also very different. Animators will always have tools that allow specifying and controlling - through manual interactive interfaces - every nuance of shape, movement, and parameter settings. But whether for skilled animators or novices, the future of animation will present a fantastically expanded palette of possibilities: techniques, resources, and libraries for creating and controlling movements

Modeling and Animating Human Figures in a CAD Environment

With the widespread acceptance of three-dimensional modeling techniques, high-speed hardware, and relatively low-cost computation, modeling and animating one or more human figures for the purposes of design assessment, human factors, task simulation, and human movement understanding has become feasible outside the animation production house environment. This tutorial will address the state-of-the-art in human figure geometric modeling, figure positioning, figure animation, and task simulation

Virtual Humans for Animation, Ergonomics, and Simulation

The last few years have seen great maturation in the computation speed and control methods needed to portray 3D virtual humans suitable for real interactive applications. We first describe the state of the art, then focus on the particular approach taken at the University of Pennsylvania with the Jack system. Various aspects of real-time virtual humans are considered, such as appearance and motion, interactive control, autonomous action, gesture, attention, locomotion, and multiple individuals. The underlying architecture consists of a sense-control-act structure that permits reactive behaviors to be locally adaptive to the environment, and a PaT-Net parallel finite-state machine controller that can be used to drive virtual humans through complex tasks. Finally, we argue for a deep connection between language and animation and describe current efforts in linking them through the JackMOO extension to lambdaMOO

Real-Time Virtual Humans

The last few years have seen great maturation in the computation speed and control methods needed to portray 30 virtual humans suitable for real interactive applications. We first describe the state of the art, then focus on the particular approach taken at the University of Pennsylvania with the Jack system. Various aspects of real-time virtual humans are considered, such as appearance and motion, interactive control, autonomous action, gesture, attention, locomotion, and multiple individuals. The underlying architecture consists of a sense-control-act structure that permits reactive behaviors to be locally adaptive to the environment, and a PaT-Net parallel finite-state machine controller that can be used to drive virtual humans through complex tasks. We then argue for a deep connection between language and animation and describe current efforts in linking them through two systems: the Jack Presenter and the JackMOO extension to lambdaM00. Finally, we outline a Parameterized Action Representation for mediating between language instructions and animated actions

Task-Oriented Computer Animation of Human Figures

The effective computer animation of human figures is an endeavor with a relatively short history. The earliest attempts involved simple geometries and simple animation techniques which failed to yield convincing motions. Within the last decade, both modeling and animation tools have evolved more realistic figures and motions. A large software project has been under development in the University of Pennsylvania Computer Graphics Research Facility since 1982 to create an interactive system which assists an animator or human factors engineer to graphically simulate the task-oriented activities of several human agents. An interactive system called TEMPUS and its high performance successor is outlined which is intended to graphically simulate the task-oriented activities of several: human agents. Besides an anthropometric database, TEMPUS offers multiple constraint-based joint positioning, dynamic simulation, real-time motion playback, a flexible three-dimensional user interface, and hooks for artificial intelligence motion control methods including hierarchical simulation, and natural language specification of movements. The overall organization of this project and some specific components will be discussed

Human Factors Simulation Research at the University of Pennsylvania

Jack is a Silicon Graphics Iris 4D workstation-based system for the definition, manipulation, animation, and human factors performance analysis of simulated human figures. Built on a powerful representation for articulated figures, Jack offers the interactive user a simple, intuitive, and yet extremely capable interface into any 3-D articulated world. Jack incorporates sophisticated systems for anthropometric human figure generation, multiple limb positioning under constraints, view assessment, and strength model-based performance simulation of human figures. Geometric workplace models may be easily imported into Jack. Various body geometries may be used, from simple polyhedral volumes to contour-scanned real figures. High quality graphics of environments and clothed figures are easily obtained. Descriptions of some work in progress are also included

GPU-Based Dynamic Search on Adaptive Resolution Grids

This paper presents a GPU-based wave-front propagation technique for multi-agent path planning in extremely large, complex, dynamic environments. Our work proposes an adaptive subdivision of the environment with efficient indexing, update, and neighbor-finding operations on the GPU to address several known limitations in prior work. In particular, an adaptive environment representation reduces the device memory requirements by an order of magnitude which enables for the first time, GPU-based goal path planning in truly large-scale environments (\u3e 2048 m2 ) for hundreds of agents with different targets. We compare our approach to prior work that uses an uniform grid on several challenging navigation benchmarks and report significant memory savings, and up to a 1000X computational speedup