The Stretch-Engine: A Method for Creating Exaggeration in Animation Through Squash and Stretch

Animators exaggerate character motion to emphasize personality and actions. Exaggeration is expressed by pushing a character’s pose, changing the action’s timing, or by changing a character’s form. This last method, referred to as squash and stretch, creates the most noticeable change in exaggeration. However, without practice, squash and stretch can adversely affect the animation. This work introduces a method to create exaggeration in motion by focusing solely on squash and stretch to control changes in a character’s form. It does this by displaying a limbs' path of motion and altering the shape of that path to create a change in the limb’s form. This paper provides information on tools that exist to create animation and exaggeration, then discusses the functionality and effectiveness of these tools and how they influenced the design of the Stretch-Engine. The Stretch-Engine is a prototype tool developed to demonstrate this approach and is designed to be integrated into an existing animation software, Maya. The Stretch-Engine contains a bipedal-humanoid rig with controls necessary for animation and the ability to squash and stretch. It can be accessed through a user interface that allows the animator to control squash and stretch by changing the shape of generated paths of motion. This method is then evaluated by comparing animations of realistic motion to versions created with the Stretch-Engine. These stretched versions displayed exaggerated results for their realistic counterparts, creating similar effects to Looney Tunes animation. This method fits within the animator’s workflow and helps new artists visualize and control squash and stretch to create exaggeration

Feeling crowded yet?: Crowd simulations for VR

With advances in virtual reality technology and its multiple applications, the need for believable, immersive virtual environments is increasing. Even though current computer graphics methods allow us to develop highly realistic virtual worlds, the main element failing to enhance presence is autonomous groups of human inhabitants. A great number of crowd simulation techniques have emerged in the last decade, but critical details in the crowd's movements and appearance do not meet the standards necessary to convince VR participants that they are present in a real crowd. In this paper, we review recent advances in the creation of immersive virtual crowds and discuss areas that require further work to turn these simulations into more fully immersive and believable experiences.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Easy as Pie: Composing for Stop Motion Animation

All film scoring consists of solving problems: technical, logistical, and of course creative. Nowhere is this more true than with animations, which require some of the most nuanced and precise musical treatments in any medium. In this essay, I explore the process of scoring the stop motion animation Easy as Pie, including the research I conducted to prepare, the challenges I faced along the way, and an analysis of the score I eventually wrote to overcome those challenges.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-scoring/1183/thumbnail.jp

Eine Annäherung an den Avantgardismus? Amateur-animation und das Ringen mit der Technik

The chapter examines the status of animation within the emerging British amateur cine movement of the interwar decades, and introduces a case study of the work of the British animator, Alan Cleave

How instructions modify perception: An fMRI study investigating brain areas involved in attributing human agency

Behavioural studies suggest that the processing of movement stimuli is influenced by beliefs about the agency behind these actions. The current study examined how activity in social and action related brain areas differs when participants were instructed that identicalmovement stimuli were either human or computer generated.Participants viewed a series of point-light animation figures derived frommotion-capture recordings of amoving actor, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor patterns of neural activity. The stimuli were scrambled to produce a range of stimulus realism categories; furthermore, before each trial participants were told that they were about to view either a recording of human movement or a computersimulated pattern of movement. Behavioural results suggested that agency instructions influenced participants' perceptions of the stimuli. The fMRI analysis indicated different functions within the paracingulate cortex: ventral paracingulate cortex was more active for human compared to computer agency instructed trials across all stimulus types, whereas dorsal paracingulate cortex was activated more highly in conflicting conditions (human instruction, lowrealismor vice versa). These findings support the hypothesis that ventral paracingulate encodes stimuli deemed to be of human origin,whereas dorsal paracingulate cortex is involvedmore in the ascertainment of human or intentional agency during the observation of ambiguous stimuli. Our results highlight the importance of prior instructions or beliefs on movement processing and the role of the paracingulate cortex in integrating prior knowledge with bottom-up stimuli

Differences between Japanese and Western anatomical animation techniques applied to videogames

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

ALLRecovery – Mobile App for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Education

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a cancer of the bone marrow. Lymphoblasts are unable to mature due to errors in signaling leading to an accumulation of non-functioning lymphoblasts. ALL is one of the most common cancers found in children; with an estimated 6590 new cases in the United States in 2016 (seer.cancer.gov, 2016). When a family finds out that their child has been diagnosed with cancer, it could be a shocking and terrifying experience. Understanding and learning about the nature of the disease can be a helpful method to cope with the fear and anxiety. ALLRecovery is created to present a friendly way to explain the complex medical concepts associated with ALL and its treatment. ALLRecovery is an interactive mobile application designed to teach patients and their families about ALL and the common treatments. The app includes 3 animations that serve as an introduction to the arcade game, RECOVER. RECOVER is a top-down shooter game where the player controls chemotherapy agents to destroy leukemia cells