324 research outputs found

    A Practical and Configurable Lip Sync Method for Games

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    Realistic Lip Syncing for Virtual Character Using Common Viseme Set

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    Speech is one of the most important interaction methods between the humans. Therefore, most of avatar researches focus on this area with significant attention. Creating animated speech requires a facial model capable of representing the myriad shapes the human face expressions during speech. Moreover, a method to produce the correct shape at the correct time is also in order. One of the main challenges is to create precise lip movements of the avatar and synchronize it with a recorded audio. This paper proposes a new lip synchronization algorithm for realistic applications, which can be employed to generate synchronized facial movements among the audio generated from natural speech or through a text-to-speech engine. This method requires an animator to construct animations using a canonical set of visemes for all pair wise combination of a reduced phoneme set. These animations are then stitched together smoothly to construct the final animation

    Content rendering and interaction technologies for digital heritage systems

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    Existing digital heritage systems accommodate a huge amount of digital repository information; however their content rendering and interaction components generally lack the more interesting functionality that allows better interaction with heritage contents. Many digital heritage libraries are simply collections of 2D images with associated metadata and textual content, i.e. little more than museum catalogues presented online. However, over the last few years, largely as a result of EU framework projects, some 3D representation of digital heritage objects are beginning to appear in a digital library context. In the cultural heritage domain, where researchers and museum visitors like to observe cultural objects as closely as possible and to feel their existence and use in the past, giving the user only 2D images along with textual descriptions significantly limits interaction and hence understanding of their heritage. The availability of powerful content rendering technologies, such as 3D authoring tools to create 3D objects and heritage scenes, grid tools for rendering complex 3D scenes, gaming engines to display 3D interactively, and recent advances in motion capture technologies for embodied immersion, allow the development of unique solutions for enhancing user experience and interaction with digital heritage resources and objects giving a higher level of understanding and greater benefit to the community. This thesis describes DISPLAYS (Digital Library Services for Playing with Shared Heritage Resources), which is a novel conceptual framework where five unique services are proposed for digital content: creation, archival, exposition, presentation and interaction services. These services or tools are designed to allow the heritage community to create, interpret, use and explore digital heritage resources organised as an online exhibition (or virtual museum). This thesis presents innovative solutions for two of these services or tools: content creation where a cost effective render grid is proposed; and an interaction service, where a heritage scenario is presented online using a real-time motion capture and digital puppeteer solution for the user to explore through embodied immersive interaction their digital heritage

    Molly

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    “Molly” is a stop-motion animated graduate thesis short film completed at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Film and Animation and screened in May of 2019. The film tells a fictional story about a young boy named Elliott whose life has changed both very drastically and very quickly. In what seems like an instant, he loses both his mother and his childhood home and finds himself standing, overwhelmed, in the street in front of his new residence as his life is seemingly being unpacked from the back of a moving truck. He is shell-shocked and feels profoundly alone but soon he, quite literally, stumbles upon the strangest girl and unwillingly becomes a guest at her rather unusual social engagement. Events take a slightly devastating turn but, in the end, both children gain a companionship that they both so desperately needed. In making this film, I sought to tell a story about acceptance, loneliness, and finding companionship in times of need. I also aimed to make a film that was visually compelling, exemplifying the breadth of my skill in prop, set, and puppet fabrication. These assets were all made by hand. The film was shot utilizing only in-camera stop motion techniques with a Canon EOS Rebel T3i Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera and Dragonframe software and was assembled in Adobe After Effects CC 2018. The film was screened before an audience of professors and peers. This thesis paper covers the conceptualization and production of the film as well as the film’s receival upon screening and my final thoughts on the film and process

    Differences between Japanese and Western anatomical animation techniques applied to videogames

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    This Project intends to analyze and explain the differences between the anatomical animation techniques used in Japanese and Western narratives and how they convey emotions, and lastly, apply this to animations provided in video games. It also provides a framework on how to use these techniques, and some examples of animations following this framework

    On a discursive conversation between queer theory and sociology

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    Dominated by a number of humanities-based disciplines and influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis and French post-structuralism, queer theory emerged in the early 1990s as a critical project that problematised the theorisation of sexuality and its relation to lesbian and gay politics. The purpose of the thesis is to have a discursive conversation between queer theory and sociology. I want to consider the current unproductive relationship between the two. From both a queer and sociological perspective, I will examine, problematise and rework sociology’s uncritical reading of queer theory and queer theory’s general failure to acknowledge and engage with sociology, with the intent to move them towards disciplinary cross-fertilisation. I will argue that disciplinary cross-fertilisation can only happen if sociology reads queer theory carefully and critically and queer theory and sociology facilitate and promote discursive spaces that are theoretically and methodologically integrated. In considering their relationship, I will draw upon a number of diverse theoretical perspectives, for example: social-historical constructionism, symbolic interactionism, post structuralism, and feminist theory. I will also draw upon my ethnographic work on gay male male-to-female drag that took place in the United States between September 1995 and June 1997, with a brief revisit in February 1999. I will finally conclude by proposing that an ‘outsider-within perspective’ serve as a basis for future engagement between queer theory and sociology. It is my opinion that the facilitation and promotion of queer and sociological perspectives that are neither full outsiders nor full insiders to their disciplinary domain would generate the conditions for disciplinary cross-fertilisation

    Lipsynching : popular song recordings and the disembodied voice

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    PhD Thesis: Multimedia items accompany this thesis to be consulted at Robinson LibraryThis thesis is an exploration and problematization of the practice of lipsynching to prerecorded song in both professional and vernacular contexts, covering over a century of diverse artistic practices from early sound cinema through to the current popularity of vernacular internet lipsynching videos. This thesis examines the different ways in which the practice provides a locus for discussion about musical authenticity, challenging as well as re-confirming attitudes towards how technologically-mediated audio-visual practices represent musical performance as authentic or otherwise. It also investigates the phenomenon in relation to the changes in our relationship to musical performance as a result of the ubiquity of recorded music in our social and private environments, and the uses to which we put music in our everyday lives. This involves examining the meanings that emerge when a singing voice is set free from the necessity of inhabiting an originating body, and the ways in which under certain conditions, as consumers of recorded song, we draw on our own embodiment to imagine “the disembodied”. The main goal of the thesis is to show, through the study of lipsynching, an understanding of how we listen to, respond to, and use recorded music, not only as a commodity to be consumed but as a culturally-sophisticated and complex means of identification, a site of projection, introjection, and habitation, and, through this, a means of personal and collective creativity
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