Carpet Unrolling Descriptors for Character Control On Uneven Terrain

We propose a type of relationship descriptor based on carpet unrolling that computes the joint positions of a character based on the sum of relative vectors originating from a local coordinate system embedded on the surface of a carpet. Given a terrain that a character is to walk over, the carpet is unrolled over the surface of the terrain. The carpet adapts to the geometry of the terrain and curves according to the trajectory of the character. Because trajectories of the body parts are computed as a weighted sum of the relative vectors, the character can smoothly adapt to the elevation of the terrain and the horizontal curves of the carpet. The carpet relationship descriptors are easy to parallelize and hundreds of characters can be animated in real-time by making use of the GPUs. This makes it applicable to real-time applications such as computer games.