Injury Assessment for Physics-Based Characters

Determining injury levels for virtual characters is an important aspect of many games. For characters that are animated using simulated physics, it is possible assess injury levels based on physical properties, such as accelerations and forces. We have constructed a model for injury assessment that relates results from research on human injury response to parameters in physics-based animation systems. We describe a set of different normalized injury measures for individual body parts, which can be combined into a single measure for total injury. Our research includes a user study in which human observers rate the injury levels of physics-based characters falling from varying heights at different orientations. Results show that the correlation between our model output and perceived injury is stronger than the correlation between perceived injury and fall height (0.603 versus 0.466, respectively, with N = 1020 and p < 0.001).