The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 13, 2013
Filed:
Jun. 09, 2009
Meng Yu, San Francisco, CA (US);
Chen Shen, Emeryville, CA (US);
William Reeves, Berkeley, CA (US);
Timothy S. Milliron, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Meng Yu, San Francisco, CA (US);
Chen Shen, Emeryville, CA (US);
William Reeves, Berkeley, CA (US);
Timothy S. Milliron, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Pixar, Emeryville, CA (US);
Abstract
Systems and methods for positioning a component of an inverse kinematics (IK) controlled animated object relative to a surface object. To help users deal with foot-ground (or other object-object) interactions efficiently, a foot-ground locking system is provided as a preprocessor to an inverse kinematics (IK) controller to automatically pose the foot on the ground. The foot is first rotated to reach the maximal contact area with the ground, then translated to touch the ground, and finally deformed to conform more tightly to the ground. The system works properly with other foot shape deformations, such as toe, heel, and ball rotations. The foot-ground locking can be used either as an interactive tool to help animators identify where the ground is or as a batch postprocessing tool to clean up foot-ground contacts whenever the animation or ground environment is changed.