Matt Gough Blog [closed]: compound actions

Wednesday, Jul 14 2004, 05:39

low level scripting (compound actions) are an important aspect of xdsn development. the ability to specify an instructions such as 'turn left and walk five paces' has a clear advantage when using speech to text processing and 'new user' functionality. in terms of avatar animation it would provide a low level scripting for web and rapid design applications.

the design of such actions should represent the language used, i.e. 'left turn' should be different from 'turn left'. the actual implementation will be dependant on real world experimentation but I will give some examples.

• a rotation in the torso ( )with a smaller and faster rotation in the shoulders. the speed of the rotation would be in a given range (± 1 to 5° rotation, ± 1 to 10% speed with a ± 5% / ° difference in both instances).
• a spiral and rotation to orientate to -90° from the starting position. a cadenced spiral (torso, hips and shoulders) to face 'left'. again there should be a difference in speed and rotation amount. it is possible that that some rotations will be targeted to be ± the -90° orientation, and may possibly be corrected with further rotation

cadenced, incremental rotation of the head, neck and shoulders with head making greatest rotational change. ± variation of 1 to 45° rotation and 6 to 12 % speed
rotations of the torso and hips follow in a similar manner. again the final rotation may or may not be -90° from the starting position.
this is just a quick illustration, it deserves better explanation and example. existing implementation are to 'fixed' too simple both in terms of notation and details. time for something new..

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