A Prototype System for Character Animation

The problem described in this paper concerns transforming a given geometric shape into another in a continuous manner. Important examples of surface deformation have been intensively investigated in the past few years. Shape deformation of three-dimensional geometric objects is a time consuming operation, but at the same time for some applications, like computer games, an opportunity to produce plausible deformations for character animation fast is very important. For this application we have selected to use compactly supported radial basis functions, because as our benchmarks show they demonstrate their applicability for real time animation. Another very important issue is ability for the artists to define very easily (intuitively) the deformations. In this paper we report on the progress of our software system (available for free to download from our web page), providing an editor that assists in the design of animated objects, using only a moderate number of easy to define control vectors (possibly irregularly positioned).