ABSTRACT
The most important objects to be animated are definitely the characters. Making a character move in a realistic way is an everlasting goal in computer animation, and a variety of techniques have been developed toward achieving that goal. This chapter presents the fundamental algorithms for character animation, upon which various state-of-the-art techniques are built. The most popular method to animate a character is to use a skeleton. It is an instance of an articulated body and is composed of a set of connected rigid components, bones. The bones are connected at rotary joints, which allow the rigid skeleton to animate in an articulated fashion. In a skeleton, the bones form a hierarchical structure with parent-child relationships. The initial pose of a character has many synonyms: default pose, rest pose, dress pose, bind pose, etc.
