Interactive performances with style and substance.

ANIMATION WITH MOMENTUM

David Wu Microsoft Game Studios GDC 2009

Takeaway
 Survey of recent research in the field of

interactive animation from the point of view of a game developer.  Assessments of the effectiveness and overall applicability of proposed techniques  A pragmatic distillation of subsets of ideas from the large, fully designed systems presented.
Emphasis on techniques and insights applicable now.

Straw Man Motivation: Animation in Games is not perfect

Da Silva et al, Siggraph 08
 [Video]  Geometric blending used to adapt existing character animations to novel situations (i.e. walk cycle on steps) does not look physically sound.  Characters do not react to external stimulation that has not been planned for (i.e. throwing boxes at people you are talking to)

They remain kinematic, which from the point of view of physical interactions is equivalent to having infinite inertia

What does an Interactive Animation System provide?

 Characters that preserve

the personality and style of their animations, seamlessly interact with a physically simulated world and take orders from the gamepad of abusive players and confused AIs.

Figure 1: Physical feasibility is one of many challenges faced by otherwise content virtual people.

Will Compelling Characters and Physics make my game Sell?

Trends of Best Selling Games
100 80 60 40 20 0 2010 2011 2012 2013
* figures beyond 2009 are estimates

Mean Physics and Animation Quality*

SIMBICON: Simple Biped Locomotion Control

SIGGRAPH 07 Kang Kang Yin, Kevin Loken, Michiel van de Panne

 Goal is to create a robust  Last goal seems to be

control system for bipeds that can:

treated as an afterthought

Balance Quality and results are not mentioned Walk with various gaits Not quantifiable? Handle external This is a first order perturbations such as concern for games. varying terrain and being pushed  Robustness as measured Transition between by physical simulation animations results is treated as the Approximate animations highest priority result. from motion capture

Van de Panne s Animation Pipeline

Each animation is a stored as the gains and parameters of one physical controller. Various controllers exist, each defined by a finite state machine with various parameters and gains. Each animation corresponds to one controller that has been trained to emulate the animation using physical actuation. In the absence of external disturbances, the resulting motion mimics the source animation. In addition to feeding the Mixer, closed loop feedback is required to determine FSM transitions. (i.e. Heel Strike)

Integrator receives forces and torques, forward dynamics equations are solved and the world state accordingly

Mixer linearly blends control parameters rather than poses. Similar controllers are synchronized such that they are in the same state. A Balance post process is applied. (see next slide for details)

Walk Finite State Machine

SIMBICON: Simple Biped Locomotion Control

SIGGRAPH 07 (continued) Kang Kang Yin, Kevin Loken, Michiel van de Panne

 System is based on PD controllers acting at joints  Each animation has its own individual control system that operates the PD gains and targets with values specified by a simple finite state machine.  While this is not treated as a first order concern, the

resulting controllers require very little memory. Compression ratios of 100:1 are typical.

SIMBICON: Simple Biped Locomotion Control

SIGGRAPH 07 (continued) Kang Kang Yin, Kevin Loken, Michiel van de Panne

 Balance control system is an adaption of the original hopper control system developed by Raibert in the 80s.  Main considerations are foot placement upon landing and inertial forces due to acceleration of legs in flight

Raiberts Hopper is Simple and effective. Unfortunately it cannot balance when stationary.

SIMBICON: Simple Biped Locomotion Control

SIGGRAPH 07 (continued) Kang Kang Yin, Kevin Loken, Michiel van de Panne

 [Video]

Continuation Methods for Adapting Simulated Skills

KangkangYin,StelianCorosPhilippe Beadoin, Michielvan de PanneSIGGRAPH 08

Simulated characters in simulated worlds require simulated skills.  An extension of SIMBICON  Machine learning is used to create new animation controllers based on  Existing controllers  New challenges such as variations in terrain, new goals, etc  Learning framework based on numerical optimization employing continuation methods  i.e. Creating an animation controller for pushing a table from a walking motion capture.

Continuation Methods for Adapting Simulated Skills

KangkangYin,StelianCorosPhilippe Beadoin, Michielvan de PanneSIGGRAPH 08

 Continuation Methods:

Continuation Methods for Adapting Simulated Skills

KangkangYin,StelianCorosPhilippe Beadoin, Michielvan de PanneSIGGRAPH 08

 [Video]

Ad Hoc Meta-analysis of perceived error in physically simulated characters

David Wu, GDC 09
 A number of studies have looked at the relative sensitivity of viewers towards various types of error in physical simulation of humans:
Anna Majkowska, Petros Faloutsos, Flipping with physics: motion editing for acrobatics, Eurographics animation 2007 Yeuhi Abe , C. Karen Liu , Zoran Popovic, Momentum-based parameterization of dynamic character motion, Graphical Models 2006 Carol O'Sullivan , John Dingliana , Thanh Giang , Mary K. Kaiser, Evaluating the visual fidelity of physically based animations, SIGGRAPH 2003 Paul S. A. Reitsma , Nancy S. Pollard, Perceptual metrics for character animation: sensitivity to errors in ballistic motion, SIGGRAPH 2003

Ad Hoc Meta-analysis of perceived error in physically simulated characters

 Meta findings regarding sensitivity to error:
Linear Momentum: High Linear Velocity: Moderate Angular Momentum: Moderate Angular Velocity: Low Conservation of Energy: Low Gravity Magnitude: Inconclusive Static Balance: High Dynamic Balance: High

 These findings have been cited in various

papers, they are considered valid despite the relatively low sample sizes and relatively poor control procedures of the studies.

Synthesis of Constrained Walking Skills

Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Kang Kang Yin, Michiel van de Panne Siggraph Asia 08

 Given a source walk cycle and model, offline optimization is used to generate many single step walk cycle variations  Each variation is generated to with the optimization goal of a random foot placement offset.

Synthesis of Constrained Walking Skills

Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Kang Kang Yin, Michiel van de Panne Siggraph Asia 08

 Variations are assembled to create what the authors call a Step-to-Step Dynamics Model or an SSDM .

The step-to-step dynamics model (SSDM). The nonparametric (example-based) model makes predictions using the results of the offline synthesis. The given dimensions for the state and actions spaces are for the 2D bipeds.

Synthesis of Constrained Walking Skills

Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Kang Kang Yin, Michiel van de Panne Siggraph Asia 08

 At run time, the controller uses the SSDM with its reference walk cycle to generate a continuous walk cycle that satisfies constraints discovered in real time.  The SSDM itself stores its data as samples compressed via principle component analysis on the differences between learned steps and the reference walk cycle.  Given the strong correlation between variations the authors discover the only 2-4 principle components are required.  Sampling consists of applying an N dimension blend on reference samples and then combining the result with the reference walk cycle.

Synthesis of Constrained Walking Skills

Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Kang Kang Yin, Michiel van de Panne Siggraph Asia 08

Takeaways  The overall framework provides:  A potential alternative to traditional foot placement IK.  Higher quality results  A potential alternative to animator provided walk cycle transitions or variations  Saves animator time

Synthesis of Constrained Walking Skills

Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Kang Kang Yin, Michiel van de Panne Siggraph Asia 08

Take-Away: PCA Hypothesis  Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is a technique used for the lossy compression of vector data sets.  A 3 DOF analogy might be DXT1 compression of a single quad of pixels. In this case only the first Principle component is maintained and this 3D vector is the is the difference between the two end point colors.  The early PCA vectors resulting from all poses of a character are strongly correlated with the signature style and physical characteristics of that character.

Synthesis of Constrained Walking Skills

Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Kang Kang Yin, Michiel van de Panne Siggraph Asia 08

Take-Away: PCA Hypothesis  When performing inverse kinematics, using PCA vectors as the degrees of freedom and weighting each in a manner inversely proportional to it s Eigenvalue, a least squares IK solution is likely to represent a pose variation that correlates highly with the preferred poses of that character.

Figure 3: 1st Principle component vector consists of DOF values that produce a characteristic pose.

Synthesis of Constrained Walking Skills

Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Kang Kang Yin, Michiel van de Panne Siggraph Asia 08

Take-Away: PCA Hypothesis (cont)  There are a few conditions that the dataset used to generate the Principle Component Vectors must meet for this hypothesis to hold:  Should be representative of the entire range of motions preferred poses  Should be representative in a quantitative, statistical sense  Appropriate DOF should form the initial basis  Forces or Poses?  May require doctoring of the input i.e. weighting the std deviation of underrepresented poses.

Figure 4: Animation set has been over-trained. The 1st Principle Component vector is not ideal.

Flexible Registration of Human Motion Data with Parameterized Motion Models

Yen-Lin Chen, Jian Yuan Miny, Jinxiang Chaiz

 An initial set of animations is collected  Animations are time-warped such that each cycle takes 2 seconds  PCA is performed on these animations and the 20 top Eigenmodes are maintained  These are run through a physics filter , which iteratively modified them until they are physically valid

Figure 9: First Principle Component

Flexible Registration of Human

(cont)

 All animations are projected onto the resulting Principle

Components  The authors claim that 20 Eigen modes is enough for mostly lossless representation  New animations are registered into the motion database and stored as linear combinations of the components  The authors state the following applications:  Effective motion retargeting  Kinematics, dynamics and style  Physics improves believability of motions  Implicitly enforced by the Components  Consistent, realistic motion generation from sparse data.  Registration enforces the constraints implied by the sparse data and fills in the blanks with motion from existing motions.

Animating responsive characters with dynamic constraints in near-unactuated coordinates

Yuting Ye, C. Karen Liu

 Combines kinematic motion with dynamic reactions that are constrained to minimize interference with muscles essential to the base motion.  To accomplish this, the system does the following:  Projects motions

Animating responsive characters (cont)

 Specifically, the system does the following:  For each frame of animation, the actuator torques required to drive the motion are computed  Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is performed on all frames of all animations.  Eigenvectors with the lowest 8 Eigenvalues are collected, these form the basis for dynamic reactions.  The biped s dynamics are represented using 8 DOF, each being a scalar multiple of one of these vectors.  For each frame of animation the forward dynamics of the system are projected onto this basis (J)  f = Mx +  Jf = (JMJt)(Jx )  Jtq = x

Animating responsive characters (cont)

 Due to the orthogonality guarantees of

PCA, these Components act in the null space of the most significant Components.  They correspond to motions requiring little or no muscle action  Hence the term unactuated  Furthermore the composite effect of these components tend to cancel each other out with respect to side effects at the primary, well actuated DOF.

Animating responsive characters (cont)

 [video]

Animating responsive characters (cont)

 Extremely efficient  Fairly convincing  Characters display motion consistent with

their style  Primary issues is that for relatively strong perturbations the response is not convincing you would expect perturbation to effect the walk cycle as a whole, unfortunately the problem statement forbids this.  Changing the problem statement would invalidate this technique.

Simulating Biped Behaviors from Human Motion Data

Kwang Won, Sok Manmyung Kim, Jehee Lee ACM Transactions on Graphics, July 2007.

 Uses machine learning to construct physical controllers that can emulate motion capture data while maintaining balance  Controllers operate on

an animator specified biped.  The system behaves best when the virtual biped is similar to captured subject.

Simulating Biped Behaviors

 Animators

(cont)

construct a finite state machine that describes potential transitions between animations.  Further controllers are generated and trained for each transition  All animations can transition to the balance/ recovery states.

Simulating Biped Behaviors

 Controllers consist of parameterized PD servos.  Training consists of finding feedback/time varying parameterization for the servos using a numerical optimization technique with the objective function of minimizing error between the motion capture and the simulated character.  The optimization problem is highly nonlinear

(cont)

Simulating Biped Behaviors

(cont)

 Optimization strategy:  Initialize solution to {0}  Scatter random points about the current solution  Optimize each point using a gradient descent

technique  Select best point(s) and repeat  Slow, brute force method.  Given optimization landscape, faster search methods such as Conjugate Gradients and Quasi Newton fail to converge, so the others use a downhill simplex descent  In the second phase of learning (transitions) the optimization parameterizations consist of a linear combination of existing controllers  Speeds up the optimization considerably  Maintains style of source animations  Key takeaway.

Simulating Biped Behaviors

(cont)

 Key Takeaways  PD servo based physical controllers with

very few biped/locomotion specific heuristics are feasible  Blending controllers trained on animation with a specific style seems yield new controllers that maintain this style.  Effectiveness demonstrated for transitions, will blending work with more general extrapolations?

Interactive Simulation of Stylized Human Locomotion

Marco da Silva, Yeuhi Abe, Jovan Popovi - SIGGRAPH 08

 Animating natural

demonstrated to human motion in provide an automatic dynamic environments solution to parts of is difficult for various this problem by the reasons, including robotics community. complex geometric  In the field of video and physical game animation, we interactions. require style and personality in addition  Simulation combined to competent with physical locomotion. controllers has been

Simulation of Stylized
Describes the systematic

(cont)

synthesis of controllers that can reproduce a range of locomotion styles in interactive simulations. Given a reference motion that describes the desired style, a control system is derived that can reproduce that style in simulation and in new environments.

Figure 1

Numerical optimization provides a

framework for computing a solution that is optimal in the context of any number of prioritized goals.
In this case the goals are balance and

style, the optimization technique is quadratic programming.

Simulation of Stylized
A balance strategy is precomputed for the given style using automated analysis of linear time varying approximations. By tailoring the balance strategy in this manner, a controller preserves the style better than a more cautious strategy

(cont)

Simulation of Stylized

(cont)

 The Style feedback loop tracks individual

joint angles to compute the accelerations needed to preserve the given style.  Reference motions guide both the style and balance feedback.  The style feedback aims to preserve the nuances of the motion  The balance feedback seeks to adapt the motion of three balance critical segments  The control algorithm computes a final set of forces by maintaining a desired tradeoff between the balance and style feedback.

Simulation of Stylized
Dynamic balance is a hard problem Many dof -> infinite solutions Numerically unstable -> most states invalid Valid states may be balanced, but awkward i.e. if you have a tendency to lean to the left, cranking your head to the right may help you to balance but it is not the most natural way to address the issue.

(cont)

Simulation of Stylized
To mitigate these problems, the authors:
 Project the higher detail (60 DOF) biped

(cont)

onto a low detail (9 DOF, 6 Actuator DOF) model

 Use a piecewise linear model to

approximate the non-linear dynamics of the reduced detail model.

 i.e F=MA, where M is a constant

matrix.
 Use a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR)

that tracks the animation data

 Assumes that poses are dynamically

stable
 Eliminates the need to explicitly

search for any dynamically stable state.

Simulation of Stylized
 The 3 link model s root is the contact

(cont)

foot and it has two 3 DOF actuators acting at the hips  One for the torso  One for the swing leg  The linearalized dynamic equations are precomputed, rolled together with the equations necessary for the LQR, factored and stored for each time step.  This amounts to about 20k per second of animation  The full character would require about 2 meg per second.  Aside: Is 60hz necessary?

Interactive Simulation of Stylized Human Locomotion

Marco da Silva, Yeuhi Abe, Jovan Popovi - SIGGRAPH 08

 [Video]

Simulation of Stylized
The results are promising:

(cont)

Maintains lifelike human motion in dynamic environments, which is difficult to accomplish with kinematics or dynamics alone Transforms a single recorded motion, valid for one environment only, into a general purpose action that can be used in many other settings or even composed with other actions to create versatile characters. Performance reasonable in worst case, plenty of room for optimizations in normal situations.

Dynamo: dynamic, data-driven character control with adjustable balance

ACM Siggraph Video Game Symposium
Pawel Wrotek, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Morgan McGuire

 Combines blended animation with the results

of a physical simulation  6 DOF springs are attached to the root of the dynamic model to keep it from falling over.

Dynamo: dynamic, data-driven character control with adjustable balance

ACM Siggraph Video Game Symposium
Pawel Wrotek, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Morgan McGuire

While not mentioned explicitly by the authors, blending in world space helps preserve the momentum characteristics of the source animations, thus making the result more physically plausible (if the source animations is physically plausible)

Dynamo: dynamic, data-driven character control with adjustable balance

ACM Siggraph Video Game Symposium
Pawel Wrotek, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Morgan McGuire  The reason for the improved preservation of momentum in world

space is the fact that the Hessian describing the system dynamics in world space coordinates varies less across poses than the corresponding Hessian describing the system dynamics in joint space.  This insight is arguably the primary take-away from the paper.  A natural corollary is that physical controllers will usually be more robust when operating in world space.
The authors point out this observation in the diagram below.

Animating reactive motion using Momentumbased Inverse Kinematics

Taku Komura, Edmond S. L. Ho and Rynson W. H. Lau Virtual Worlds 2005

Impact

Find animation for balance recovery

Modify Animation to match momentum

Momentum Based IK blends Simulation+Reaction

Animating reactive motion

(cont)

 System designed for dynamic reactions that

allow for recovery.  Intended to bridge the gap between Ragdolls and layered hit reactions for mild impacts that do not affect the characters momentum or trajectory
Animations with different stepping strategies form the basis for reactions Foot placement of animations is modified counteract the characters momentum. This balance strategy is basis for Asimo s control system The ideal foot placement point is called the Zero Moment Point

Animating reactive motion

 Momentum Based IK consists of:

(cont)

Constraining a kinematic motion to conserve momentum each frame

This is achieved by running a physical simulation in which only the non-essential DOF have finite inertia. Initial DOF accelerations are computed using backwards differencing between the prior state and the animation sample.

Playing back the new, modified animation.

System must be able to maintain velocity/momentum, along with state across frames

Animating reactive motion

(cont)

 Seems quite effective in theory

Unfortunately I was unable to find a video

 Fits in nicely with existing systems  Performance cost is low  Not too far from what some people do

currently

Interactive Dynamic Response for Games

Victor B. Zordan, Adriano Macchietto, Jose Medina, Maarc Soriano, Chun-Chih Wu, I3D 07

Motion
Reaction Animation

Impact
q(t)

Impact

Find Reaction Simulation

Blend

Simulation
Time

Blend Simulation -> Reaction Animation

Reaction Animation

Interactive Dynamic Response

(cont)

 Assumes many hit reactions (paper cited 500 in their tests)  Finding the appropriate reaction becomes a bottleneck
Uses an optimized search tree based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) Quality of SVM is highly dependent on the DOF used in classification Tried many combinations Optimal set of DOF was 20 in total:
Momentum (linear and angular) at various time steps surrounding the impact Center of mass at same time steps Orientation at time of impact

 Once a good SVM is constructed, real time search is

feasible for a large number of motions

Time to find animation was cited as ~2 ms vs 2 seconds prior to the SVM.

Interactive Dynamic Response

(cont)

 [video]

Anticipation from Example Victor Zordan, Chun-Chih Wu, et al.

Defensive Motion

Impact
q(t)

Reaction Animation Detect Impact Impact

Defensive Motion

Find Reaction Simulation

Blend

Simulation

Time

Blend Simulation -> Reaction Animation

Reaction Animation

Simple Steps for Simply Stepping

Victor Zordan, Chun-Chih Wu, et al. Visual Computing 2008

Inspired by the paper Animating reactive motion using Momentum-based Inverse Kinematics
Uses Momentum based IK to drop animation Uses principles of Dynamic Balance/Zero moment point to synthesize steps from example

Predict Momentum

Find suitable step motion

Adjust for situation based on Balance Combine with dynamic constraints and existing motion

Kinematic Playback

Wrap: Research, Animation and Physics

 There is a lot of great research and many ideas with strong

potential.  When evaluating ideas, it is important to remember that the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts.

Figure 3: When shipping a game, elegance and simplicity occasionally slip. When publishing a paper, elegance and simplicity occasionally slip.

Characters that preserve the personality and style of their animations, seamlessly
interact with a physically simulated world and take orders from the gamepad of abusive players and confused AIs.

Just about every successful entertainment medium features compelling characters personality and style are essential. Animators are often better at creating compelling characters than random algorithms/equations. In games we have Animators (hopefully) and many algorithms/equations.
Presenting optimal relevant algorithms that preserve the personality and style of characters/animators is the focus of this lecture.

Characters that preserve the personality and style of their

seamlessly interact with a physically simulated world and take orders

animations, the gamepad of abusive players and confused AIs.

from

 Interactivity defines a video game.

A non-interactive game is a movie.

 Physics is a powerful tool that can enable

Interactivity through simulation.

There are other ways but they suck They are:

Characters that preserve the personality and style of their animations, seamlessly interact with a physically simulated

take orders from the gamepad of abusive players and confused AIs.
world and

 I found two papers addressing this concern

Ideas and or results are depressing Not worth mentioning They are:

Questions & Answers

Figure 1: Physical feasibility is one of many challenges faced by otherwise content virtual people.

Past End of File. You should not be here.

 Please shut down current application.  Reboot if necessary.

Problem: Game is Interactive. Animation Database is not.

 Modeling the large space of animations that may be

required at any moment due to open ended nature of player actions is non-trivial  Rule based controllers handle this via animation selection guided by heuristics.
i.e. pre-authored decision tree populated with animation clips. Many problems and failure cases Still the basis for many animation systems

 Apparently academia sees this as a problem - over

the last five years, the amount of research dedicated to this problem has grown exponentially.

The Arsenal
 Meta techniques
Generalizing from examples
Interpolate and/or extrapolate from source animations Weighted blend of source (convex interpolation) Transform source to a new basis using direct techniques (i.e. PCA) Use source to train/derive more complex models. Splice to micro motion snippets and transition rapidly

Synthesis
Physical Simulation
Rag dolls Secondary dynamics

Kinematic and/or Dynamic Constraints

Inverse Kinematics Physics Filter

Physically based controllers General Human biometric data

 The best solutions tend to be hybrid implementations of these

techniques, as each has its limitations and strengths.  Hence the term Arsenal :
Use, understand, build, augment, combine, patent

Generation and Visualization of Emotional States in Virtual Characters

 Diana Arellano , Javier Varona , Francisco

Perales CASA 08  The aim of this paper is to model characters that have PERSONALITY, feel EMOTIONS and can MANIFEST EMOTIONAL STATES  The motive is to create unique, real, distinguishable individuals depending on their personalities and emotional states