2/2 Interactive Character Animation

What I found really interesting in this lecture was the research that used multiple objective functions to create the character animation. For example, the one where the person had to reach for the ball while still keeping himself balanced. I think this technique can be really useful. Yes, you want the character to perform a certain action, but you also want him to be physically plausible, and this is a good way to do it. Weighting physical constraints higher in your function than the desired action is an interesting way to maintain a character's believability. While we might not realize this, I think this is pretty similar to the way people think when we do certain actions. For example, imagine you're standing on a ledge and you want to get down. Reaching the ground is the action we want to perform, but that's not the only thing in our internal objective function. We also take into consideration our physical capabilities as well as our own safety. If the ledge is only a couple feet off the ground, we might just jump, but if the ledge is a lot higher, we think of another way to get down safely. We might sit down on the ledge and then jump, or look along the sides for some stairs. Sure, we don't think about complicated physics when we're deciding how to act, but we do take many things into consideration.