Whenever I walk our dog, Lorna, and she takes enough of a break from sniffing things to get up to a trot, I'm fascinated by the way her ears bounce:
I thought I'd see if I can model the motion using a similar technique to the one in this post. In this case though, we have a sequence of these angular springs, each exerting a force proportional to its angle from the previous one. I put together a Python script to run the simulation. There are various parameters I tweaked, like the stiffness of the springs, and the distribution of the mass, but none of my models were quite as cute as the real thing! Some samples:
Uniform mass, weak spring
This was my first attempt, but it came out a bit frantic:
Linear mass, weak spring
In the video, it's just the tips of Lorna's ears the bounce, so I wondered about decreasing the mass at the tips. This seemed a bit better, but a little saggy:
Linear mass, strong spring:
To give the ears a little more lift, I increased the stiffness, which looks pretty good, but still lacks the essential "d'aww" factor:
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