Abstract
Expressiveness is an essential ingredient of character animation. The Effort component of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) has been studied for providing users with expressive motion control of articulated figures. As the Effort component is directly related to the dynamic qualities of a movement, this thesis tries to explore the dynamic computation aspects of the Effort component. A dynamic-based and motion capture-driven computation model for motion simulator is proposed. Since it is motion capture-driven, it is able to retain realistic details of the given example. Moreover, since it is dynamic-based, the relationship between dynamic behaviors of the Effort qualities and dynamic parameters of low-level controller can be investigated in a more natural way. The correspondences between controller's parameters and Effort qualities are established so that the specified Effort quality can be realized by varying their corresponding dynamic parameters. In other words, the proposed motion simulator not only can mimic the given example effectively, but also provides control capability for varying motion qualities according to specified Effort qualities. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed simulator, several experimental examples are presented and their results are discussed. Keywords： Animation Techniques, Dynamic-based Animation, Motion Capture and Human body Simulation, Motion Control, Procedural Modeling