Synthesizing realistic animated human motion using multiple natural spaces

When animating virtual human, it is important that the movements created are realistic as well as meet various constraint. One way to create motion, given a starting pose, is to first find an ending pose that meets the various constraints. This is followed by calculating the motion needed from the starting space to the ending space. Traditional inverse kinematics method are able to find poses that meets certain constraints, however these poses are not always natural. Linear interpolation between starting pose and ending pose can be used to create motion. Once again however, the interpolation method does not always create motion that is natural.;This thesis proposes the creation of natural space. The natural space is a hyper-dimensional space in which every point in this space describes a natural pose. Motion can be created by traversing over the points in this space. The natural space is created by reducing the dimensionality of motion capture data using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Points in the reduced space retain the characteristic of the original data. Multiple natural spaces are created on different segment of the human skeleton.;This thesis describes a method to generate new constrained natural poses that is natural. The poses synthesized are more natural than traditional inverse kinematics, and single space PCA. Motion is created through a space consisting of pose configurations and angular speed. A method to generate realistic looking motion based on this space is given in this thesis.