We present a solution to animating interactions between characters and thin, non-rigid bodies using a passive optical motion capture system. Prior work in human body motion capture can accurately recreate human motion but this work is not adequate because it does not allow for interactions with a non-rigid body. Prior work in face and cloth motion capture handles non-rigid planes but rope is better handled with a curved spline rather than a curved plane. The segmented motion is in the form of un-indexed motion capture data. After segmenting the motion of the thin, non-rigid body and the human character the separated motion capture data can be recreated individually. The recreated motion streams are then recombined using 3D modeling and animation software. The presented solution also improves techniques for recreating thin, non-rigid body motion from un-indexed motion capture data. Using the linear combination of two predicted marker positions our solution can accurately track motion capture markers through each frame of the motion capture data. This also allows our solution to invent marker positions when gaps are present in the motion capture data. Our improvements allow users to reconstruct the motion of both a human character and a thin, non-rigid body simultaneously from motion capture data gathered in a mixed motion capture session.

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This essay examines the limitations of societal gender norms and expectations of the late nineteenth-century and how the fictional character Ántonia Shimerda adheres to and fails to conform to them. In nineteenth-century America men and women were divided into two different spheres. Women were expected to stay within the four walls of the home and take care of cooking, housekeeping and raising the family’s children. The home was believed to be the only place where a woman could be truly happy. However, in the novel Ántonia proves that women can be happy performing physically demanding tasks outside of the expected sphere for women. To explore Ántonia’s gender fluidity this essay focuses on gender expectations and norms in the historical setting of the novel and analyzes the reasons for her to abandon her gender and the consequences this has in her life. The representation of a character that both adheres to and fails to conform to the nineteenth-century gender perceptions indicates the performative nature of gender. Cather creates a fluid gender in Ántonia, who proves to be both an independent and strong character that clearly illustrates the limitations of rigid gender norms.

For synthetic data generation with concave collision objects, two physics simu- lations techniques are investigated; convex decomposition of mesh models for globally concave collision results, used with the physics simulation library Bullet, and a GPU implemented rigid body solver using spherical decomposition and impulse based physics with a spatial sorting-based collision detection. Using the GPU solution for rigid body physics suggested in the thesis scenes con- taining large amounts of bodies results in a rigid body simulation up to 2 times faster than Bullet 2.83.

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Two Poisson brackets are called compatible if any linear combination of these brackets is a Poisson bracket again. The set of non-zero linear combinations of two compatible Poisson brackets is called a Poisson pencil. A system is called bihamiltonian (with respect to a given pencil) if it is hamiltonian with respect to any bracket of the pencil. The property of being bihamiltonian is closely related to integrability. On the one hand, many integrable systems known from physics and geometry possess a bihamiltonian structure. On the other hand, if we have a bihamiltonian system, then the Casimir functions of the brackets of the pencil are commuting integrals of the system. We consider the situation when these integrals are enough for complete integrability. As it was shown by Bolsinov and Oshemkov, many properties of the system in this case can be deduced from the properties of the Poisson pencil itself, without explicit analysis of the integrals. Developing these ideas, we introduce a notion of linearization of a Poisson pencil. In terms of linearization, we give a criterion for non-degeneracy of a singular point and describe its type. These results are applied to solve the stability problem for a free multidimensional rigid body.

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Thesis (Sc.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND AERO. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Olivier Andre Bauchau. / Sc.D.