UCLA Adds Physics to Prat-falls

BaltoAaron writes "CNN.com is reporting on Petros Faloutsos , a UCLA scientist, that has developed a program that creates animation based almost solely on physics. Faloutsos "believes his animation program will one day allow virtual stunt artists to replace their flesh-and-blood counterparts in performing otherwise deadly feats of derring-do." "It's the Holy Grail of character animation. Everybody wants to do it, but there's not a whole lot of it out there right now.""

Really?

Havent the video game makers created a program that creates animation based almost solely on physics yet? ;)

This is lame by comparison

This guy http://www.q12.org/phd-movies.html did a physical body *and* made it walk with artificial controls. (And he's developed a library for the physics called ODE which makes doing a body falling down stairs about a days work, maybe half.)

Re:This is lame by comparison

Sorry, but you are not very clued in on the
research. Petros did not make a physical
simulation of a human walking. That had been
done many years earlier. Researchers at
Georgia Tech [Hodgins, et al.] and U Penn
[Badler, et al.] have focused on simulated
humans since the early 90's, simulating motions
from running to bicycling to diving.

Petros's work was on integrating these motions
together: so a character could walk, trip,
dive, land, roll, and stand back up again.
He used support vector machines to learn
the domains of acceptable pre- and post-
conditions of different movements and plan
the transitions.

stick to plots rather than eye candy

so, better special effects, big whoop

Porn

What this guy meant to say is that this is the Holy Grail for Porn. You know why.

Not just normal physics, either

You could get into the program and change a variable or two and have your characters looking like they really are on a high-gravity or low-gravity planet, or in the viscous atmosphere of Jupiter, or whatever you like! I'm looking forward to it.

I thought this had been done already

Except that it had been done using sensors placed on someone's body vs. coded. Sounds brilliant, though! I'd like to see some trash-and-smash on the big-screen that they haven't been able to do before.

Re:I thought this had been done already

Of course, there are definite advantages to putting sensors on someone's body.

If I fall down the stairs, what's going to happen to, say, my right arm, wrist, and hand? Sure, if I'm unconscious, that will all be dictated by physics - I'll flop around like a rag doll and you can nicely see all the reactive forces at work.

But if I'm conscious, how is the programming going to emulate my increasingly desperate attempts to keep from breaking my neck?

It seems to me that a better effect would be captured simply by hooking up motion sensors to a stuntman, telling him to take a five-minute break, and then throwing him down the stairs when he wasn't looking. The "mechanics" realm of physics has relatively simple rules; panic does not. So far, we don't have any formulas for the interaction of perceived danger, temperament, adrenaline, and what have you.

Prediction of the reaction of a slashdot user...

Now we'll get to see the three stodges remade with Cowboy Neal, John Katz, and CmrdTaco punching each other using computer physics. What a great world.

saw it

I saw a sneak of the time machine and I distinctly remember the skeleton crumbling scene they talk about in this article.

I remember thinking that something about it looked unnatural, even a little cheap. Now I know it wasn't a low budget effect, just a new technique.

While this may one day create much more realistic effect in film, I'm not sure it's quite ready yet. Did this scene stand out for anyone else that saw this flick as a little "off"?

Curious

Haven't special effects wizards been using physics simulators for movie effects and video games for at least a few years now? Sure, this may be more advanced then previous physics engines, but is it really something revolutionary?

Maya

I believe that Alias Wavefront's Maya has already done this.

so whats the difference

between this and the same hardware that can be used with lightwave or nomad?

Animate your own...

From his web page [ucla.edu]:

DANCE is a portable, open, plug-in based, object-oriented software package for physics-based character animation. It runs on Linux, Irix, Windows 98/NT and is being ported to MacOS by Joe Laszlo. One of its goals is to provide researchers with a common platform where they can test their control methods and share their results. In addition, it provides the common, yet complex functionality that everyone needs in a physics-based animation system, allowing researchers to concentrate on their research work. Dance has been used for a variety of physics-based applications that include biomechanics modelling and composeable controllers. For more information, please contact the authors.

It's available to download and play with!

finaly

well if they can get the power to do it so be it.

Every computer generted graphic movie thus far has failed but no one is totaly sure why. Final fantasy though excelent with the eye popping candy you realize that is is just a computer after 5 mins of enteraction. I dont see this comming to true fruition as of yet. But yes it would make for alot better FX. Some times i just watch a movie for the FX.

The thing that worrys me most is that from most films eye candy takes up for true plot. Now if we can make a computer that can make really good plots the movies will rock.

But this does sound alot better then bill hicks idea of using the termanaly ill and people sentanced to death to do this work. Though it still is kinda appealing.

Kudos to any one that can pull it off am sure they will who knows one day we can all make gore fest as a plug in to adobe premere.

Re:finaly

Every computer generted graphic movie thus far has failed

Uh... Toy Story I/II, Bugs Life, Monster's Inc, Shrek, Antz (which I think sucked but did good business)... I wouldn't exactly call them failures.

Good for him, but

There has been research in this area being done for years, much of it presented at SIGGRAPH. There are techniques to animate characters through intricate plots just by specifying behavioral charactics, techniques to apply motion dynamics to characters of significantly different shape, and even "video puppetry" that allows images to self-animate in response to speech. All are a number of years old. All were hailed as holy grails. This just seems to be a case of CNN finally noticing.

At last year's SIGGRAPH, everyone already knew about polynomial textures, because there had been a news story about it. To me, though, the highlight of the show was that it is now possible to walk around with an uncalibrated, handheld camera, and completely automatically get a decent 3-D model out of it (textured, of course). No news story about that.

Animats has done this for years...

Years and years...

http://www.animats.com/

Ten years at SIGGRAPH

Physics-based animation has been a hot topic in computer graphics for a decade. SIGGRAPH made a major award to Prof. Andy Witkin of Carnige Mellon in 2001 for major progress in this field. This involves anmal motions, objects colliding, objects shattering (e.g. Phantom Menace) and so on.

Oooh I want!

That looks like way too much fun to toy with. That way I could say something along the lines of "I want to beat up my big sister", go through all the frustrating physics behind it... then not really want to do it as I would have exhausted my poor brian trying to figure out higher math. I think this is cool... good for the movie industry? Probably.. But eh, I also kinda like the actors that have the guts to do their own stunts. Shows they enjoy it and actually do the work they are getting paid to do. bad thing is, actors might be goin' out of work quicker.

SIGGRAPH

Wow, all one-year-old SIGGRAPH papers should be slashdot stories.

Hells Bells

This is the death of competitive FPS games as we know it. No longer will we be able to change our jump direction in midair, jump 7 feet through windows, run tirelessly carrying 750 rounds of ammunition, and get hit by blast damage through walls.

On the upside, the blood & guts is going to look a lot cooler.

This could be useful...

Well, the trouble with using it to replace stuntmen has as much to do with the realism of actual footage of an event vs a cgi simulation of one.

That is, there are many other factors that cgi imagery comes no where close to mimicking, so even if tommorow this software let you create completely realistic human animation, it wouldn't put the union out of business yet.

Many of the more spectacular stunts in our favorite action movies...such as the ones in crouching tiger...used the computer simply to composite the scene elements (like replacing the ropes from the flying harnesses), rather than recreate the scene. Or that train crash in Die Hard 3. The computer is often used to combine several "real" footages (like combining the actors on one set and the dangerous stuff on another) rather than do a whole scene, anyway.

However, games could be great with this tech. I have always wanted to see a realistic fighting game, one with actual full physics animation, medical grade damage modeling (and when someone is hurt, realistic degradation of their performance), and the completely unscripted movements that an animation engine like this would allow.

For instance, if someone punched your on screen avatar in the gut, your character would first stagger with the blow, and then shake back and forth as he tries to catch his breath. If you hit one of the attack commands at that moment, the subsequent attack animation would be modified by him still recovering from the blow, as WELL as what the other player was doing. A compltely freeform system. Yes, I know its possible to fake some of this now but there are some obvious limits. For instance, no matter how hard or how light your avatar got punched, he will probably still stagger with the same animation.

And of course the "beowolf cluster" of all these technologies : a massively multiplayer online game where you can run around fighting other avatars like above, as well as casting spells, killing monsters, leveling, looting, camping, kill stealing... All the rest of the good things we come to expect from games of this type

Online Games

Now add this to some online games and suddenly Everquest becomes even more addictive.

(Of course, knowing EQ, the requirements will go up to a Quad Xeon 2Ghz with 4GB RAM and dual GeForce 4's. And it will still be slow)

Smell my finger!

I think that there is something on it.
Really!

Demetri Terzopoulos' page

http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~dt/

This is rather old, last year's SIGGRAPH and all, but I thought the even older artificial fish were always kinda cool.

Not true

There's nobody in the animation industry that thinks it's a good idea. Not directors, not animators, not modelers. The article talks about Character animation. Everything else has been out there for a long time. Particle simulations, rigid and soft body dynamics, and cloth sims are all standard in the industry now. But, and this is a big BUT, after the simulation is run there is ALWAYS tweaking that must be done by an artist. It might work for simple physics, but once again CNN is reporting 5 years too late.

Human brain still necessary.

I'm willing to believe that this is a new and sophisticated tool, though I see there are already a bunch of credible posts about prior art (I go to SIGGRAPH, too).

My issue is that a lot more than physics needs to go into an animation. There's brain up there controlling all those muscles, it's not just a bunch of sticks and rubber bands. A character animator is an *actor*, part of his or her job is to give the appearance of intention to a character's performance.

Falling down the stairs is (relatively) easy. Show me the panic the moment he realizes he's lost his balance and can't stop himself. Does he flop like a drunk or roll out like Jet Li?

You still need to control a character with a human brain, whether that brain belongs to a mocapped stunt man or an animator.

CNN title misleading

The researcher performed this work for his
Ph.D. thesis at Toronto. Though he is
most likely continuing the line of research
as a professor, the article is about his
thesis work.

I don't get it-- this is OLD NEWS

"Inverse kinimatics" was added to such modeling/rendering programs as SoftImage [softimage.com] back in the early 90s. You could "drop" stuff and have it bounce around or blow in the wind or act like jello or whatever. Yes, even fall down stairs.

You just create your model and connect the "bones" (fundimental objects that move) via articulated joints that could swivel in any direction you specify. Then determine what forces are acting on it (gravity or wind for example) and stuff like how the objects interact (do they bounce? or stick?) and then just hit "play" and off it goes...

What's the big deal here?

This would remove *any* point...

in watching Jackie Chan movies :-)

Jackie Chan rocks!

How did that ever get posted to /.

Every decent visual effects house is already doing better stuff than that - and with physics too.

The foot

"It's the Holy Grail of character animation."

I thought Terry Gilliam was the Holy Grail of anima.. oh nevermind..

Movies & Physics?

Since when have movies cared about physics? I mean, in Speed the bus "jumps" an unfinished section of an overpass.

And when was the last time you saw a movie where the explosion is seen BEFORE it is heard?

Not to mention virtually every space fiction movie ever made with the sole exception of 2001.

painful lack of animation experience on display

this post should be taken with a grain of salt, as I am not a professional 3-D computer animator. however, I am trained in the art/craft of 2-d animation (particularly drawn character-based animation), so I'm far from clueless.

simply put, physics based animation will have a _long_ distance to go before it starts to look "good" to anyone who wants to see anything beyond "physics".

The inherent problem is that there is rarely a one-to-one correspondence between something being "physically accurate" and something being "visually entertaining". in other words, entertaining/compelling visuals aren't necessarily based in physical reality.

Prime anecdotal evidence: Wile E. Coyote.

"But that's not live action!" you say. Well, this also applies to the vast majority of live-action "action movie" sequences; the overwhelming majority of these are composed of multiple takes shot from multiple angles on multiple sets, and later composited/edited together - in other words, the action was _not_physically_possible_, but had to be "assembled" from lots of smaller, quasi-physically-possible elements.

many of the posts here reference video game physics as unrealistic; they've got it exactly right - except that this is far more than a video-game-specific issue.

of course, in the long term the need to "ficitionalize/cheat" at physics may be addressed by a layer operating _above_ the physics engine (perhaps tweaking physical laws, running a simulation but changing the rules over time, etc.), but in the end it's still going to take a lot of direct creative input in order to get anything out of these systems that anyone will _want_ to see.

and it will be an even longer time before the output from that kind of system will produce anything not directly comparable to graphic work entirely based on photoshop (or GIMP) "filters" - i.e. it will look pre-packaged, cheap, and not terribly distinctive.

while I really appreciate the work that these people are doing (and believe that it will have wonderful applicatons in court cases/medicine/sports), calling physics-based animation a "holy grail" for _storytelling_ is nothing other than to mistake the long term goal of these projects as being to completely remove humans from the creative process of filmmaking.

and I've already seen "Battlefield Earth", thank you.

- jdbo

Saw his demo last month

Dr. Faloutsos gave a colloquium talk to the CS department at my college [hmc.edu] recently, including a dozen or so simple examples of his DANCE system. It was really very impressive.

Faloutsos' work is not actually focused on the physics models, but on the control programs for the virtual actors. This allows dynamic, force-based animation (as opposed to kinematic, position-based animation). Each model has a set of controllers for various tasks like walking, running, jumping forward, moving from a prone position to a standing position, etc. Each controller knows its "competencies" -- the conditions under which it can successfully guide the model. These are used to hand off control from one controller to the next as the model goes through a complex motion or reacts to external forces.

The sample movies that Faloutsos showed were mostly unscripted. They would start with a model in a simple standing state, which would then respond to user-controlled forces like pushing or throwing simulated balls at the model from various angles. Various balance-recovery controllers would take over depending on how the model was displaced; if none of them were succesful then the model would fall down, and then use one of its controllers for returning to a standing position. All of this appeared incredibly realistic and human.

Also, as another poster noted, DANCE [ucla.edu] is available under a "free for non-commercial use" license (not free under the FSF or Debian definitions, but a good deal in my opinion). He encouraged us to try it out, explaining that research like his has suffered from a lack of common infrastructure, leading to a lot of reinvented wheels. He expressed hope that the DANCE framework would allow more innovative research with less duplicated work.

Already been done

Everybody knows that the Road Runner cartoons are based almost entirely on quantum physics.

Just imagine...

...how much better Jar Jar Binks would be.

Finally, a way to simulate...

My zero-point energy extraction device. I've waited for this moment for years.

Killing dreams, dammit

Am I the only one who wanted to be the unknown stuntman growing up? Crap, there goes another career option.

Videos of this effect are here

http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~pfal/animations.html

Fictional Physics would be more fun...

I think it'd be fun to play with a physics simulator of sorts, but to be honest, I'd rather have a tool where I can change or even invent my own laws of physics. Take Yosemite Sam for a moment: somehow he can survive a shotgun blast in the butt. In reality, his butt'd be missing a few important pieces, but in Toon Town, the unexpected happens.

Physics are.. well.. expected. If I could change the rules around a bit, I could create fun yet silly little movies. Remember that Far Side cartoon where a black hole suddenly formed in that guy's apartment, and everything started getting sucked into it? Heh I could animate that! Let me tweak the physics a bit, and I could really have some fun with it!

not to be utterly humorless

maybe it's just late, or maybe I'm pissed about being mistaken for gay one time too many, or maybe my feminism is rearing its head, but this quote is strinking me as being especially retarded:

"You can tell from how someone is walking if they're effeminate or angry. How would you account for that in a physics-based system?" said Darren Hendler, technical director at Digital Domain Inc., a Los Angeles special effects studio.

"effeminate or angry"? Guess he hasn't met too many pissed-off women.

physics modeling big step for gaming

Physics game engines will be creating the next level of gaming experience. For the past few years there have been tremendous advances in the realm of graphics, rendering objects in amazing detail and complexity. However, those verisimilar badboys are merely eye-candy that glosses over a scripted world.

With the introduction of physics modeling, your victim can die a thousand different deaths, and remove that deja-vue feeling you get after killing the thousandth Strogg.

While many games have incorporated aspects of physical modeling into their games, I believe this stuff is finally about to pop. I know that the Sony PS2 was built on MathEngine's physics SDK, and Seamus Blackley (one of the pioneers of the genre and developer of Trespasser, the first game to incorporate physics into most aspects of gameplay - and was a flop) has been hoisted by Microsoft for the Xbox developement. Maybe soon we'll stop getting that feeling everytime we lock and load that someone is whispering in our ear to "ignore the man behind the curtain!"

Related links:
(2001) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.08/physics.ht ml
(1999) http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-514530.html

Physics Engine players:
http://www.mathengine.com
http://www.ha vok.com

Re:Smurfs : The Socialist Propaganda +2, Funny

at least