Injury Assessment for Physics-Based Characters

Abstract

Abstract. Determining injury levels for virtual characters is an important aspect of many games. For characters that are animated using simulated physics, it is possible assess injury levels based on physical properties, such as accelerations and forces. We have constructed a model for injury assessment that relates results from research on human injury response to parameters in physics-based animation systems. We describe a set of different normalized injury measures for individual body parts, which can be combined into a single measure for total injury. Our research includes a user study in which human observers rate the injury levels of physics-based characters falling from varying heights at different orientations. Results show that the correlation between our model output and perceived injury is stronger than the correlation between perceived injury and fall height (0.603 versus 0.466, respectively, with N = 1020 and p < 0.001).

FARMS: Framework for Animal and Robot Modeling and Simulation

“…The physics engine is the core of a neuromechanical simulation. The common steps performed by a physics engine are described by Geijtenbeek (2013) as: Collision detection checks if the body intersects with itself or other physical objects in the scene. Forward dynamics simulations computes the linear and angular accelerations of each simulated body. Numerical integration update positions, orientations, and velocities of bodies, based on the previously computed accelerations. The steps outlined above simulate the articulated rigid bodies and their interactions with rigid terrain. The choice of physics engine/simulator is extremely important for stable simulations of the specific experiment.…”

Interactive Character Animation Using Simulated Physics: A State‐of‐the‐Art Review

“…The use of reduced coordinates allows for higher simulation performance and has the benefit of not having to deal with constraint force tuning. On the other hand, reduced coordinate simulation is more vulnerable to numerical instability in the case of near‐singularities, while full coordinate simulation has the benefit that constraint forces enable simple emulation of natural joint compliance [GVE11]. Featherstone [Fea08] describes an efficient approach for performing reduced coordinate simulation.…”

“…without the use of external forces). The use of a natural injury metric as an optimization criterion could be helpful for the development of such controllers [GVE11].…”