Plant animation, such as swaying with wind and vibrating under impulsive external forces, is an ordinary phenomenon in realistic virtual world. In this work, we propose a uniform model for realistic plant swaying as well as cartoon-like animations in real time. In most 3D games or virtual reality applications, plant is usually static due to the complex structure of plant and to the consumption of driving them to animate. So we believe the approach in this paper will have much significance in a large field of applications like 3D game, walkthrough systems and some other virtual reality (VR) applications. Our approach adopts articulated skeleton for the bifurcated structure of most plants to control their motions. Different from simple skeleton, each joint in the skeleton constitutes an imaginary angular spring to emulate some elasticity. In order to control the large elastic skeleton of plant in real time, we propose two presumptions of simplification, which are suitable to the plant motion. With these simplification, the skeleton model is finally degraded to a second-order linear dynamic system. We further decouple the joints of the skeleton by localizing the equation solving of every joint. It therefore provides a very fast algorithm for calculating the dynamics of the plants under the influence of external forces and torques. On the basis of realistic simulation of plant motion, we build a real-time dancing animation system: "Dancing Flora", with which the users can design and enjoy 3D choreographic performance to express their feelings towards the given music. While the main modules presented in the system include music analysis, this paper stresses only on the animating model and choreographic designing of botanic characters. In addition of kinematic interpolation, we add dynamics in the real-time controlling of skeletons to make more smooth movement than merely geometric controls. Another unique feature of our dancing system is the introduction of scriptbased interface. It presents users with relatively high-level means to create dancing animations by themselves. Therefore our system is also a kind of dancing design tool for various applications like video game and movie producing.
修改评论