One step at a time: animating virtual characters based on foot placement

Abstract

Especially in a constrained virtual environment, precise control of foot placement during character locomotion is crucial to avoid collisions and to ensure a natural locomotion. In this paper, we present an extension of the step space: a novel technique for generating animations of a character walking over a set of desired foot steps in real time. We use an efficient greedy nearest-neighbor approach and warp the resulting animation so that it adheres to both spatial and temporal constraints. We will show that our technique can generate realistic locomotion animations over an input path very efficiently even though we impose many constraints on the animation. We also present a simple footstep planning technique that automatically plans regular stepping and sidestepping based on an input path with clearance information generated by a path planner.