Path Abstraction for Combined Navigation and Animation

Natural motion of virtual characters is crucial in games and simulations. The quality of such motion strongly depends on the path the character walks and the animation of the character locomotion. Therefore, much work has been done on path planning and character animation. However, the combination of both fields has received less attention. Combining path planning and motion synthesis introduces several problems. A path generated by a path planner is often a simplification of the character movement. This raises the question which (body) part of the character should follow the path generated by the path planner and to what extent it should closely follow the path. We will show that enforcing the pelvis to follow the path will lead to unnatural animations and that our proposed solution, using path abstractions, generates significantly better animations.