Pseudo Dynamic Keyframe Animation with Motion Blending on the Connguration Space of a Moving Mechanism

This paper presents an eeective way of generating and controlling dynamic motions of a multi-linked body system while interpolating given boundary conditions. The basic idea is based on smoothly blending two dynamic motion curves in the Connguration space of a moving mechanism. Given a time interval t 1 ; t 2 ], two motion curves C 1 (t) and C 2 (t), t 1 t t 2 , are generated by physical simulation so that they satisfy the boundary conditions at t = t 1 and t = t 2 , respectively. The two curves are then smoothly blended on the Connguration space so that the blended motion curve satisses the boundary conditions at t = t 1 and t = t 2. Higher degree blending functions provide extra degrees of freedom in controlling the generated motion in the middle of the time interval t 1 ; t 2 ]. It is straightforward to extend the motion blending technique to keyframe animation. Compared with the conventional animation techniques for a multi-linked body system, the motion blending technique achieves not only computational eeciency but also pseudo dynamic motions by incorporating the merits of each of the previous methods within one system.