State of the Art of Character Animation

By definition, to animate is to bring to life, in this case, to make a lifeless object (a graphics model) move. Realistic animation of human motion is a challenging task, firstly, because human movements can be quite complex since joints have many degrees of freedom and, secondly, because people are skilled at perceiving the subtle details of human motion. For example, people are capable of recognizing friends at a distance purely from the way they walk and can perceive personality and mood from body language. This implies that synthetic human motion needs to be very accurate in order to appear real.