Interactive spacetime control of deformable objects

Creating motions of objects or characters that are physically plausible and follow an animator's intent is a key task in computer animation. The spacetime constraints paradigm is a valuable approach to this problem, but it suffers from high computational costs. Based on spacetime constraints, we propose a framework for controlling the motion of deformable objects that offers interactive response times. This is achieved by a model reduction of the underlying variational problem, which combines dimension reduction, multipoint linearization, and decoupling of ODEs. After a preprocess, the cost for creating or editing a motion is reduced to solving a number of one-dimensional spacetime problems, whose solutions are the wiggly splines introduced by Kass and Anderson 2008. We achieve interactive response times through a new fast and robust numerical scheme for solving the one-dimensional problems that is based on a closed-form representation of the wiggly splines.