Generating realistic animation of human locomotion is an important issue in computer graphics. Recently, motion capture technique is widely used to obtain realistic motion data in character animation. In this thesis, we propose a new method that generates human locomotion along a given curved path using prescribed motion clips. Provided with various realistic motion segments such as straight walking, turning to left and turning to right, we perform the following three steps. First, we select appropriate motion segments for the given path and stitch them to yield an initial motion. Then, we specify foot positions and orientations to deform the initial motion to follow the given path, and finally we adjust the initial motion to meet the specified foot positions and orientations. We exploit curvature profiles of the given path and the body trajectory of each motion to select appropriate motion segments. Obtained by simply stitching those motion segments, the initial motion may not be appropriate for a human-like figure to follow the given path. Therefore, we deform the initial motion to adapt for the path. We extract the postions and orientations of stance foot from the initial motion, and transform them along the path to specify the desired positions and orientations for curved path locomotion. Then, we adjust the initial motion to satisfy the desired foot positions and orientations. This problem can be formulated as a motion editing problem with spacetime constriants. We adopt a hierarchical displacement mapping technique [11] to deform the body and other joint angles so that the motion meet the constraints such as foot positions and orientations. We demonstrate that the suggested method produce a realistic locomotion. The method also enables a human-like figure to perform a variety of movement such as walking, jogging, and so on.
