On the inductive inverse kinematics algorithm for an articulated body

Abstract

Inverse kinematics is a very useful method for controlling the posture of an articulated body. In most inverse kinematics processes, the major matter of concern is not the posture of an articulated body itself, but the position and direction of the end effector. In some applications such as 3D character animation, however, it is more important to generate an overall natural posture for the character rather than place the end effector in the exact position. Indeed, when an animator wants to modify the posture of a human-like 3D character with many physical constraints, he has to undergo considerable trial-and-error to generate a realistic posture for the character. The Inductive Inverse Kinematics (IIK) algorithm using a Uniform Posture Map (UPM) is proposed to control the posture of a human-like 3D character. The proposed algorithm quantizes human behaviors without distortion to generate a UPM, and then generates a natural posture by searching the UPM. If necessary, the resulting posture could be compensated with a traditional Cyclic Coordinate Descent (CCD). The proposed method could be applied to produce 3D-character animation based on the key frame method, 3D games and virtual reality.