Bezier Spline Demo Videos

I put together some quick videos demonstrating some of my spline an motion-along-a-path work I discussed in this post.

I'm intending this to be used as a tool to allow artists to test their animation blending while the character is in motion.

NOTE: the character that exists in many of my demonstrations of this tool is Tad from an unrelated DigiPen game called Tad Studbody and the Robot Rampage (download here).

The green sphere at Tad's feet is the Center of Interest that controls his orientation along the path. It's simply the average of a point 1 meter ahead, two meters ahead, and 3 meters ahead (Tad's units make him much larger than a normal person).

You can see the shells (the blue lines) where I generate extra points to make the piecewise Bezier spline interpolate the input points. The smoothing factor is also demonstrated. A smoothing factor of 0 causes the path to become linear.

Bezier Spline Interface from Zak Whaley on Vimeo.

This is a path generated from the originally described algorithm where I fudged the first and last tangents by laying a chord between the first two points and the last two points.

Open Path Demo from Zak Whaley on Vimeo.

This is a closed path using a slightly modified version of the algorithm which says that the first and last tangent are parallel to the chord stretched between the second input point and the last input point.

Closed Path Demo from Zak Whaley on Vimeo.