Computer Animation, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11

Behavioral Animation

As discussed in the previous chapters, there are a variety of ways to specify motion. Some are very direct. In key-frame animations, for example, the animator precisely specifies values for animation parameters as specific frames and selects an interpolation procedure to fill in the remaining values for the in-between frames. There is not much mystery as to what the parametric values will be or what the motion will look like. In physically based animation, such as rigid body dynamics, the animator might specify starting values for some of physical simulation parameters, for example, initial position and velocity. The animator generally knows what the animation will look like but does not have a good idea of the ...