March 23rd, 2014

This week I worked on adding joint limitations to the elbows and knees.  The knees can now only bend 5 degrees forward and 150 degrees backward (along the x axis) and cannot be rotated along any other axes.  The elbows are not fully working yet as they can only rotate 90 degrees forward along the y axis.  I ran into some difficulties getting the elbows to be able to rotate 150 degrees forward as the conversion from degrees to radians is making the math weird.  I plan to figure out the reason why and fix it by next week.

I also edited the joint structure so that the pelvis acts as the root for the mannequin allowing the lower back joint to control the bending and motion of the upper body.  I need to adjust the code to prevent the lower back joint from being able to translate, and instead set that to work on the pelvis.  I also want to make a button that will select the entire mannequin instead of having click selection for the non-joint pelvis object.

Next week, I plan on implementing the ball and socket joints in the shoulders, hip and neck.  I also plan on reviewing the inverse kinematic algorithms to see which would work best in my app and how I can make it work properly with three.js