Environment-Adaptive Contact Poses for Virtual Characters

Abstract

We present a novel method to generate a virtual character's multi-contact poses adaptive to the various shapes of the environment. Given the user-specified center of mass (CoM) position and direction as inputs, our method finds the potential contacts for the character in the surrounding geometry of the environment and generates a set of stable poses that are contact-rich. Major contributions of the work are in efficiently finding admissible support points for the target environment by precomputing candidate support points from a human pose database, and in automatically generating interactive poses that can maintain stable equilibrium. We develop the concept of support complexity to scale the set of precomputed support points by the geometric complexity of the environment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by creating contact poses for various test cases of environments.