Other Articulated Figures
Several excellent Java 3D articulated figure examples are out on the Web:
- Ana
Alessandro Borges has developed an articulated figure with named parts, with a similar joint-based
TransformGroupimplementation as here but with spheres at the limb intersections (http://planeta.terra.com.br/educacao/alessandroborges/ana/ana.html). Movement/rotation commands are grouped together to form keyframe animations. Forward kinematics controls the interaction between the limbs.- The Virtual Drummer
This 3D drummer by Martijn Kragtwijk is coded in a similar way to my figure, but the emphasis is on animating the model by having it play along to the drum parts of music (http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/Projects/virtualdrummer/). The site contains a number of papers on the work.
The fun idea of animation through music recognition has been extensively developed in Wayne Lytle's Animusic (http://www.animusic.com/), which is unfortunately not Java-based.
- Robot Simulation
Yuan Cheng wrote a graphical, interactive, physical-based robot control simulation environment using Java 3D (http://icmit.mit.edu/robot/simulation.html) back in 1999. The robots are built using a hierarchy of
TransformGroups.- H-Anim Working Group
The H-Anim (Humanoid Animation) Working Group (http://www.h-anim.org/) has developed a VRML97 specification for representing figures. There is no Java 3D implementation available, but the specification contains numerous good ideas on how to model an articulated figure. ...