Dynamic Motion Synthesis

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dotcom
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Joined: Fri May 30, 2008 4:58 am

Dynamic Motion Synthesis

Post by dotcom »

I couldn't find any topics in the forums about this so I decided to start a new topic. I've been doing a lot of reading about DMS (Dynamic Motion Synthesis), which I'm sure a lot of you have probably heard or read something about. With DMS, animations aren't scripted but are generated on-the-fly by the hardware's processors as the game is played. A perfect example is something throwing rocks at an NPC - the NPC would dodge the rocks realistically, dependent on where they are thrown.

NaturalMotion has a product called euphoria which does just this. From their site:
Previously, animation data had to be manually created (through key-framing) or recorded (through motion capture). This is often expensive and laborious, and results in static, non-interactive data.

euphoria is instead based on a full simulation of a 3D character, including body, muscles and motor nervous system. This creates fully interactive animations that act and react differently every time.

I was wondering if anything like this was in the works for Bullet or anyone had even talked about it. euphoria is closed co-development - which just sounds expensive - so I thought I would post something here. I was watching some videos on their site and they're really impressive, the way characters move and how things affect them and much more.

You can check out their site here: http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm

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Erwin Coumans
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Re: Dynamic Motion Synthesis

Post by Erwin Coumans »

There has been several discussions about this topic, you can search for 'euphoria' or related terms on this forum, for example in this thread.

We have been working closely with various game companies that use Natural Motion or do similar work, including Rockstar in GTA IV. We plan on adding Featherstone constraints, stronger motors, inverse kinematics and animation bindings to Bullet. This will make Bullet more suitable as underlying physics engine for such purposes.

If you want to check out work that is more closely related to Euphoria, check out http://www.magix.ucla.edu/dance and http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~ashapiro
Hope this helps,
Erwin
dotcom
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri May 30, 2008 4:58 am

Re: Dynamic Motion Synthesis

Post by dotcom »

That's awesome information Erwin - thank you so much! I was doing a lot of reading about DMS from euphoria and a few other sites and I'm really impressed with it. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has DMS, but also has DMM - Digital Molecular Matter where objects in the world act as they really should (wood splintering in random spots, glass breaking randomly each time, etc..).

With the Openlancer project that I'm working on (lead programmer), Bullet is our choice for Physics, so I thought I'd ask if anything like that will be in there, or something like it.

Thanks for the response Erwin. :)
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