Abstract
Generating realistic walking motion for a virtual manikin is a problem that generally relies on motion capture data or advanced balancing models. We propose a simplified control method for generating walking cycles animations without using a physics engine, and without using almost any direct physics simulation, based on inverse kinematics for step guidance. It was shown that this method can reproduce realistic walking patterns as well as a a diverse set of steps (side stepping, backwards stepping, etc.) through only two given manikin joint configurations. As the method is very cheap in computational cost as well as data dependency it can serve as an alternative when these are of primary concern.