1. Computer Animation Thesis “brief” Vic, CS 288, 10/22/98

2. Persistence of Vision Persistence of Vision (POV) refers to how many frames per second are required to give the illusion of fluid motion 24 frames per second are required to achieve POV

3. Keyframing Creating key, or critical, frames of an animation sequence that define the scene -- much like a storyboard The progression of the animation between the key frames is called “tweening”

4. Traditional Animation With traditional animation, each frame was hand drawn Main cartoonists would create keyframes and have “tweeners” fill the gaps

5. Think about this... To create a 5 second animation with POV at 24 fps, that requires 120 separate frames!

6. What did you say??? With a running time of 69 minutes, Walt Disney’s Bambi required 99,360 separate frames of animation. My thesis document was 120 pages and contained 100,000 letters. That’s almost 1 frame for every letter in my thesis!

7. Traditional Animation Drawbacks Time consuming Difficult to achieve a 3D effect Unrealistic shading 2-D look

8. Computer Animation Animator needs to draw only keyframes of the animation. The computer then acts as a tweener to draw the subsequent frames.

9. Computer Animation Advantages Easy to create high quality animation Better suited to the entertainment industry due to photo-realistic results Fast turn around time (once a model is created)

10. 3D Advantages Reusable models photo-realistic results realistic shadows proper perspective projections / views unlimited viewpoints easy to add special effects to a new or existing animation

11. Inverse Kinematics A fast, efficient tool for creating realistic motion Automatically calculates connected joint movements

12. Creating Complex Biped Models Model body components using primitive objects Define a hierarchy for the primitive objects Place pivot points between parent/child objects Use Inverse Kinematics to define joint properties

13. Hierarchy Chart Upper torso –neck head –upper arm lower arm –lower torso hips –upper leg lower leg

14. Useful 3D Modeling Tools Boolean Operations Texture Mapping Inverse Kinematics

15. Allows an animator to define object attributes so that the model behaves similar to the real world object Attributes such as joint “degrees of freedom”, type of joint, and relational changes can be defined.

16. Network Rendering Use a “rendering farm” to render jobs Master/Slave configuration Have the master send out individual rendering jobs to slave machines on the network. When they have finished a frame, submit image and get new assignment. Master machine combines images into animation

17. In Conclusion Computer animation has unlimited potential Today’s state of the art computer animation software is ready for tomorrow’s CPU’s!!!! Computer animation is a powerful tool to entertain as well as educate