3/1 Stochastic Character Animation

I really liked the idea of this paper, being able to create different versions of the same action. I think this is important because we don't all do the same things the exact same way, and if you have one "stock" version of an action, not only is it repetitive but it might not look right on different characters. However, I didn't think it was necessarily successful in creating natural motions. The motions, for the most part, looked physically possible, but sometimes didn't look at all like what someone might naturally do. For example, in the video, there was a character swimming breast stroke, which looked pretty normal. Then we saw the output from this algorithm to reproduce the breast stroke, and it looked so bizarre to me! Yes, the motions were certainly physically plausible, but the timing between the arms and legs looked very strange - not like how someone who really knew how to swim would do. There's an important distinction between what motions are possible and what motions are natural, and this seems to be a problem a lot of people run into. How do you put constraints on your algorithm to only create natural movements? All the time we see outputs that are physically possible, but no one would ever actually do the actions that way. To a computer, they're all the same. I think this is what makes all of this stuff so difficult! There's really no way to separate out the awkward, unnatural motions in your algorithm.