Current progress
Reviewing my current progress against my estimated milestones created before beginning development reveals that my early expectations were inaccurate.While the contents of my initial milestones largely remain essential, what I have already learnt has shown that I have underestimated the size of several goals and had not fully understood the relationship between some of the necessary functionality.
Understanding the mechanisms of forward kinematics gave me a greater understanding of the functions of inverse kinematics, though my research showed that for my project its implementation would be irrelevant as Unity’s hierarchical structure can automate the action of FK.
Developing my analytical IK solution also took longer than anticipated. I had underestimated how many issues specific to inverse kinematics I would need to overcome, as well as the task of not only implementing analytical IK, but then tailoring the solution to give behaviour representative of natural human motion.
Adjusting Future Milestones
Because of the significant number of lessons I had to learn to overcome the issues encountered when creating an analytical solution, I have decided that developing a procedural gait in 2D - before progressing to a heuristic iterative search IK implementation in 3D, will be of greater benefit to the project.I expect dealing with issues using the simpler analytical solution in 2D will give me a greater understanding and ability to deal with the more complex IK solution in 3D in the later stages of the project.
I have already done some reading in preparation of the following weeks and found that some of my planned goals can be condensed by refining some of the behaviours.
Trajectory generation, smooth hip motion through the support limb phases, and inverse kinematics to simulate the knee hinge joint are essential to the production of the procedural locomotion.
The nature of each of these elements means that they will only function in my solution once all the others have also been implemented. To reach this stage I will develop each one separately, before combining them into a single scene to reproduce a biped gait.
The table below details my projected timeline to completion of the analytical 2D procedural locomotion scene.
| Week Beginning | Milestone Deliverable |
|---|---|
| 10/12/18 | Trajectory Planning, implementing curve path |
| 17/12/18 | Hip motion through support-limb phase |
| 24/12/18 | Combination of behaviours and creation of locomotion logic |
| 31/12/18 | Completed 2D biped procedural walk gait |
