Development and assessment of Blender animated participant-specific three dimensional meshes created from OpenSim to analyse swimming motion

• Main Author: Ong, Vince Li Jie
• Other Authors: Heng Kok Hui, John Gerard
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Bioengineering; Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/153583
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A 3D mesh of an elite swimmer was animated and developed, and the goal was to ensure consistent joints kinematics in comparison with OS when exporting to Blender . However, joints were not replicated entirely. Hence, a Python code was developed to assess and map out the errors between OS and Blender within each joint’s location and orientation with respect to the global space. Out of the 37 bones replicated in Blender, 18 bones were found to have deviated more than 10% from their original OS positions and orientations. These relative errors were highlighted by their root mean squared values to provide greater clarity between the two animations. These errors were later classified in terms of their patterns – systematic and random errors. For majority of the errors, qualitative and quantitative conjectures could be made to account for the discrepancies in animation. In summary, the proposed method provided the groundwork for future research aiming to develop higher fidelity meshes in order to perform more in-depth analysis, such as the use of CFD, on these animations.