Two Minute Papers – Digital Creatures Learn To Walk

In this episode, we are going to talk about computer animation, animating bipeds in particular. If we have the geometry of a creature, we need to specify the bones, the muscle routings and the muscle activations to make them able to walk. Depending on the body proportions and types, it may require quite a bit of trial and error to build muscle layouts so the creature doesn’t collapse. Making them walk is even more difficult! This piece of work not only makes it happen for a variety of bipedal creatures, but the results are robust for a variety of target walking speeds, uneven terrain and other, unpleasant difficulties.