The inductive inverse kinematics algorithm using uniform posture map

Abstract

Inverse kinematics is a very useful method to control the posture of an articulated body. In most inverse kinematics processes, the major matter of concern is not the actual posture of an articulated body, but the position and direction of the end effector. In some applications, such as 3D character animation, however, it could be more important to generate the overall natural posture of a character rather than to place the end effector in its exact position. Indeed, when an animator wants to modify the posture of a human-like 3D character with many physical constraints, he actually has to undergo many a trial-and-error to generate a realistic posture of the character. The inductive inverse kinematics (IIK) algorithm using uniform posture map (UPM) is proposed to control the posture of human-like 3D characters. The proposed algorithm quantizes human behavior without distortion to generate a UPM, and then generates a natural posture by searching the UPM. If necessary, the resulting posture can be compensated with traditional CCD (cyclic coordinate descent). The proposed method can be applied in various fields such as 3D character animation based on the key frame method, 3D games and virtual reality.