Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 11 (NIPS 1998)
Radek Grzeszczuk, Demetri Terzopoulos, Geoffrey E. Hinton
Computer animation through the numerical simulation of physics-based graphics models offers unsurpassed realism, but it can be computation(cid:173) ally demanding. This paper demonstrates the possibility of replacing the numerical simulation of nontrivial dynamic models with a dramatically more efficient "NeuroAnimator" that exploits neural networks. Neu(cid:173) roAnimators are automatically trained off-line to emulate physical dy(cid:173) namics through the observation of physics-based models in action. De(cid:173) pending on the model, its neural network emulator can yield physically realistic animation one or two orders of magnitude faster than conven(cid:173) tional numerical simulation. We demonstrate NeuroAnimators for a va(cid:173) riety of physics-based models.