Alright so we have things now in graphics that some *raises hand* never thought would be realized. If you play the latest FIFA Soccer, you’ll see some pretty accurate detail in the graphics. Players’ bodies, facial characteristics, hairstyles, even their signature moves. In fact, if you just look at action shots from the game, you might think it’s a pretty damn good reproduction of reality. But one thing that isn’t quite right is how these characters move. That’s because these models are just a bunch of dots in space, fitted with curves I guess and this makes up a very accurate model of their contours. Then the shapes are covered with mesh, that is bitmaps of some kind, which makes them look like 3D objects with surfaces, rather than just dots. Imagine fitting a towel tightly over a ball, covering it’s surface completely. But they are hollow characters, their mass is completely unaccounted for. So when you render still images, they look striking, but when you try to animate these models, you’re facing a whole new set of problems.
You couldn’t build a real human being with just a shell, so in graphics you can take that shortcut. But when you move limbs around to simulate real human motion, it’s not very clear exactly how to do this. What EA Games does is bring in some of these players they want to model, fit them with a large number of sensors all over their bodies, and tell them to move around just like they do when they’re playing matches. So let’s say you have a sensor at the knee and one at the shin. Now you can register the movement in all three dimensions of these two body parts relative to each other. And with enough points on the body, you get some kind of 4D model of human motion. What you can do now is plot these points where the sensors are on the human body to points on the computer model. You have to define joints to determine which parts move, but after that you can pretty much reproduce the same move that the human does with the computer model of the human. Pretty neat, huh?
