Sketching-out virtual humans: From 2d storyboarding to immediate 3d character animation

Virtual beings are playing a remarkable role in today’s public entertainment, while ordinary users are still treated as audiences due to the lack of appropriate expertise, equipment, and computer skills. In this paper, we present a fast and intuitive storyboarding interface, which enables users to sketch-out 3D virtual humans, 2D/3D animations, and character intercommunication. We devised an intuitive “stick figurefleshing-outskin mapping” graphical animation pipeline, which realises the whole process of key framing, 3D pose reconstruction, virtual human modelling, motion path/timing control, and the final animation synthesis by almost pure 2D sketching. A “creative model-based method” is developed, which emulates a human perception process, to generate the 3D human bodies of variational sizes, shapes, and fat distributions. Meanwhile, our current system also supports the sketch-based crowd animation and the storyboarding of the 3D multiple character intercommunication. This system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes

Fox Fire

“Fox Fire” is an independent animated short. Its plot is centered on a young boy, a mysterious girl, and their adventures at a Japanese summer festival. The purpose of this project was to create a short and fun animation to stir the imagination of its viewers while incorporating elements of Japanese culture and experimenting with unique aesthetic choices. During the initial brainstorming stages of this capstone, I decided that I wanted to somehow incorporate pieces of Japanese culture and mythology into the project. Not only is the folklore fascinating, I often enjoy expressing my Japanese heritage through artwork. The choice of animation as the medium was a result of my respect and admiration for the craft as well as my interest in illustrating “conceptual art”. The project began with the creation of various preliminary and conceptual works, such as a written story, storyboard, character design, background paintings, and concept paintings. These elements help to establish a solid foundation on which to build the final animation. Thanks to these initial steps, the story is clear, the look of each character is consistent, and the color choices are worked out. As an Illustration major, I viewed these steps as particularly crucial in the creation of a successful final project. The look that “Fox Fire” ended up taking was heavily influenced by animated movies that I have always admired. For instance, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland inspired the black expanse that my young boy character gets sucked into. I used a variety of mediums to complete this initial process, including charcoal, acrylic paints, digital painting, and even cardboard. The final animation was created using Adobe Flash, a widely used animation software. Most of the frames were hand-drawn directly into Flash using a Wacom tablet, while others utilized the software’s “tweening” function. While “tweening” - a function that automatically generates frames for simple movements – is useful, it creates an unnaturally smooth “computer generated” aesthetic. Therefore, I tried to minimize its use. The “ink drawn” look of the characters was at first just a happy accident created by Flash’s ability to create interesting line-weight and eventually evolved into an intentional aesthetic choice. Throughout the process of creating the animation, various fluctuation in style and character designs occurred, mostly as a result of time constraints or the worry of something looking clichéd. The project was certainly a balancing act of creating “economical” animation while still struggling to retain high-quality drawings and fluid motion. I believe that this is something all independent animators struggle with due to the heavy workload that accompanies even very short animations. However, I believe the end product of “Fox Fire” is well-made, enjoyable to watch, and something that I can take pride in. Though my major revolves around creating beautiful still images, the venture into moving art was an interesting departure and I hope to experiment with it again in the future

Remembering Nostalgia : Trends of Nostalgia within contemporary animated films

The use of 2D animations visual designs within contemporary 3D animated films has become a vastly more popular and far-reaching trend, with big animation companies like Pixar and Disney, releasing several films since 1995 that reveal a re-emergence of 2D nostalgia in main-stream animation. I believe this is a result of a desire in audiences for a more nostalgic aesthetics, in the form of 2D aesthetics in the character designs and overall style choices within contemporary 3D animated films. I will endeavour to explore this trend within this research report by discussing two films from director Brad Bird, The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004), that I feel explore this contemporary trend of nostalgia specifically within the animation industry, stressing the importance of the visual signifiers that I believe incorporate this current trend of nostalgia. This paper does not, however, look at nostalgia as a broad based cultural phenomenon, but rather looks at the aesthetics of nostalgia specifically in terms of my two case studies and feature film animation. To do this, this paper will look to define nostalgia in terms of animation, exploring the sentimental nostalgia that I believe is evident in my two case studies, after which it will look at the history of 2D and 3D animation, and how the developments within these two mediums made the aesthetic of my case studies possible. The majority of this paper will be dedicated to discussing my chosen case studies in terms of the visual indicators of nostalgia that can be found within them. Throughout this paper, I will attempt to show that the aesthetic of these two films is a direct result of the nostalgia that contemporary audiences and animation studios have for a specific style of animation and the lifestyle associated with it, from a time that embodies this: 1950s and 60s America.GR201

Representing ideas by animated digital models in architectural competitions

This paper presents the results of the research and of related didactic activity, about digital representation in contemporary architectural competitions. 3D digital models, and more recently requested animations, represent a powerful tool for increasing evaluation capability by jury members as well as knowledge and comprehension by common people. The high complexity in creating and animating 3D digital models has to face an unusual separation of jobs and responsibilities between atelier activities and rendering works. The research constitutes one topic of a teaching, given in the 1st degree of Architecture Sciences (Polytechnic of Turin -Italy) and involves also continuous updating about software potentialities. Aim of the didactic activity is to provide the students some critical and operative tools in order to give them the whole mastery of synthetic representation of their design ideas. We can foresee, in future architectural competitions, the implementation of 4D representation, also referring to its progresses and applications to other media, like cinema and entertainment

Drawing from motion capture : developing visual languages of animation

The work presented in this thesis aims to explore novel approaches of combining motion capture with drawing and 3D animation. As the art form of animation matures, possibilities of hybrid techniques become more feasible, and crosses between traditional and digital media provide new opportunities for artistic expression. 3D computer animation is used for its keyframing and rendering advancements, that result in complex pipelines where different areas of technical and artistic specialists contribute to the end result. Motion capture is mostly used for realistic animation, more often than not for live-action filmmaking, as a visual effect. Realistic animated films depend on retargeting techniques, designed to preserve actors performances with a high degree of accuracy. In this thesis, we investigate alternative production methods that do not depend on retargeting, and provide animators with greater options for experimentation and expressivity. As motion capture data is a great source for naturalistic movements, we aim to combine it with interactive methods such as digital sculpting and 3D drawing. As drawing is predominately used in preproduction, in both the case of realistic animation and visual effects, we embed it instead to alternative production methods, where artists can benefit from improvisation and expression, while emerging in a three-dimensional environment. Additionally, we apply these alternative methods for the visual development of animation, where they become relevant for the creation of specific visual languages that can be used to articulate concrete ideas for storytelling in animation

ProteinShader: illustrative rendering of macromolecules

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cartoon-style illustrative renderings of proteins can help clarify structural features that are obscured by space filling or balls and sticks style models, and recent advances in programmable graphics cards offer many new opportunities for improving illustrative renderings.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The ProteinShader program, a new tool for macromolecular visualization, uses information from Protein Data Bank files to produce illustrative renderings of proteins that approximate what an artist might create by hand using pen and ink. A combination of Hermite and spherical linear interpolation is used to draw smooth, gradually rotating three-dimensional tubes and ribbons with a repeating pattern of texture coordinates, which allows the application of texture mapping, real-time halftoning, and smooth edge lines. This free platform-independent open-source program is written primarily in Java, but also makes extensive use of the OpenGL Shading Language to modify the graphics pipeline.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>By programming to the graphics processor unit, ProteinShader is able to produce high quality images and illustrative rendering effects in real-time. The main feature that distinguishes ProteinShader from other free molecular visualization tools is its use of texture mapping techniques that allow two-dimensional images to be mapped onto the curved three-dimensional surfaces of ribbons and tubes with minimum distortion of the images.</p

Studio Ghibli’s landscapes and animation: design, characteristics and process

This dissertation joins the vibrant discussion in the animation and art industry about the impact of digital technology on culture and older more traditional hand drawn techniques, which are still used by art houses such as Studio Ghibli. It explores the visionary presence that digital techniques have had mainly in Japanese animation culture. From the perspective of someone who has been closely following the main animation houses for a long time, the mix of an autoethnographic and theory-based approach helped give clarity to the changing field and its impact on culture. Looking at key thinkers such as Blaire(2015) and Sullivans(2005) dissection of the research method, allowed me to combine my thoughts on digital evolution in animation while linking it to a theoretical framework. By analysing concrete narrative studies used by Theorists such as Bigelow(2009) and Wells(2002) and then combining that with industry artists of both traditional and modern techniques, I demonstrate that late 20th century aesthetics of art and design in Japanese anime can be pushed to new heights with use of digital technology but also explore the possible drawbacks to traditional styles it would have. Breaking down modern stereotypes of Japanese animation as viewed by western culture was a fundamental point in this research and was achieved by analysing the artistic differences using case studies between different art directors including Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai.

Advanced Computer Graphics Aided Molecular Visualization and Manipulation Softwares: The Hierarchy of Research Methodologies

In the present day, the huge obstacles, and the major technical problems encountered by the teaching and research faculties, academicians, industrial specialists, laboratory demonstrators and instructors, fellow students and researchers, etc. are to adopt integrative approaches of demonstrating (learning) chemistry and chemical education, and the realistic ways of delivering (grasping) scientific materials articulately with graceful and effortless manner. Towards minimizing these challenges, various audio-visual tools and technologies, advanced computer aided molecular graphics, freely available electronic gadgets assisted chemistry and chemical education apps, human unreadable data reading and accessing softwares, etc. are being incorporated worldwide as the most indispensable physical and electronic means for successful professionalisms. This short article is essentially a collective report underscoring extraordinary approaches, incredible efforts, and innovative skills of the computer based chemical and molecular graphics towards illuminating intrinsic parts of the chemistry and chemical education, and revealing various aspects of the cutting -edge research. As their representatives, herein, the different type computer coding languages based graphical tools such as Molden, GaussView, Jmol, and Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) are referred, and elucidated their potential applications and remarkable attempts in the advancement of diverse areas of chemistry and chemical education. Beside this, the most essential graphical features, unique rendering abilities with magnificent views, splendid visualizing skills, awesome data accessing functionalities, etc. of each of them, and their invaluable roles for studying complex molecules, biomolecules, crystals, and the entire material assemblies as well as for investigating global and local molecular physicochemical properties are presented concisely with the special stresses on their relatively better and comparatively more applicable distinctive attributes explicitl