Animating physically realistic human characters is challenging, since human observers are
highly tuned to recognize human cues such as emotion and gender from motion patterns. Any new
effort towards improving the physical realism of animating the human body is therefore valuable
both for application and research purposes.
The main contribution of this paper is a new model firmly based on biomechanics. The new model
has been developed to animate some basic steps of ballet dancers, and it is supported by computer
simulated experiments showing good agreement with biomechanical measurements of real-life
dancers.