Animating facial images with drawings

Ankara : Bilkent Univ., 1996.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1996.Includes bibliographical references leaves 54-56.The work presented here describes the power of 2D animation with texture mai^ping controlled by line drawings. Animation is specifically intended for facial animation and not restricted by the human face. We initially have a sequence of facial images which are taken from a video sequence of the same face and an image of another face to be animated. The aim is to animate the face image with the same expressions as those of the given video sequence. To realize the animation, a set of frames are taken from a video sequence. Key features of the first frame are I’otoscoped and the other frames are automatically rotoscoped using the first frame. Similarly, the corresponding features of the image which will be animated are rotoscoped. The key features of the first frame of the sequence and the image to be animated are mapped and using cross-synthesis procedure, other drawings for the given image are produced. Using these animated line drawings and the original image, the corresponding frame sequence is produced by image warping. The resulting sequence has the same expressions as those of the video sequence. This work encourages the reuse of animated motion by gathering facial motion sequences into a database. Furthermore, by using motion sequences of a human face, non-human characters can be animated realistically or complex characters can be animated by the help of motion sequences of simpler characters.Tunali, Gamze DilekM.S

Visuality and the haptic qualities of the line in generative art

The line has an important and particular relationship with the generative artwork distinct from other elements such as the ‘pixel’, ‘voxel’ or the ‘points’ that make up point clouds. The line has a dual nature as both continuous and discrete which makes it perhaps uniquely placed to straddle the analog and digital worlds. It has a haptic or felt quality as well as an inherent ambiguity that promotes a relatively active interpretive role for the audience. There is an extensive history of the line in generative systems and artworks, taking both analog and digital forms. That it continues to play an important role, alongside other more photographically inspired ‘perceptual schemas’, may be a testament to its enduring usefulness and unique character. This paper considers the particular affordances and the ‘visuality’ of the line in relation to generative artworks. This includes asking how we might account for the felt quality of lines and the socially and culturally constructed aspects that shape our relationship with them. It asks whether, in what has been described as a ‘post digital’ or even ‘post post digital’ world, the line may offer a way to re-emphasise a more human scale and a materiality that can push back, gently, against other more dominant perceptual schemas. It also asks what generative art can learn from drawing theory, many of the concerns of which parallel and intersect with those of generative art

A survey of comics research in computer science

Graphical novels such as comics and mangas are well known all over the world. The digital transition started to change the way people are reading comics, more and more on smartphones and tablets and less and less on paper. In the recent years, a wide variety of research about comics has been proposed and might change the way comics are created, distributed and read in future years. Early work focuses on low level document image analysis: indeed comic books are complex, they contains text, drawings, balloon, panels, onomatopoeia, etc. Different fields of computer science covered research about user interaction and content generation such as multimedia, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, etc. with different sets of values. We propose in this paper to review the previous research about comics in computer science, to state what have been done and to give some insights about the main outlooks

Designing and Animating a Character Sprite with Modern Techniques

High-quality 2D animation for video game production is both strenuous and time consuming. Traditionally, 2D game animation consisted of drawing each frame by hand and processing it into a bitmap for use in-game. As every frame was individually drawn, it was difficult to create enough drawings for smooth animation as well as keep form consistent between frames. Although, this technique usually resulted in a strong sense of 3D volume and realism when well executed. Current technology allows for faster 2D animation workflows using interpolation and bone systems as well as greater consistency, smoothness, and efficiency, but oftentimes the results lose the sense of depth and quality found in traditional animation. This thesis explores efficiently creating, and animating a 2D sprite by utilizing a composite of traditional animation techniques and computer animation practices. Using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash, and the Unity3D game engine, a short game was created to demonstrate this process in a finished work

Specimen poetics: botany, reanimation, and the Romantic collection

This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and specifically its aspiration to delimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes in eighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanical metaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, and representational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked, pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) translated the aesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the figurative ground for poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. These competing metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today

Drawn Together: Collaborative Performance

In the collaborative work of Drawn Together, a group formed by the artists Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall, diverse practices are collectively materialised through performance drawing. Focusing on the notion of fragmentation has been instructive in identifying how the collaboration binds together a series of fragments and discontinuities that are enacted and reassembled in unpredictable and new ways

Co co nut

This paper is a companion to my thesis film, CoCo Nut. Thesis film is the third animation I made at RIT. From Position (one quarter film) to Noble (two quarter film), the core focus of my story moved from individuality to family; so for my third and last film at RIT, I wanted to make my country the core essence of my story. The idea of my thesis film is about Taiwan, where I was born and raised. It is a story on the importance of cooperation. Due to our unique historical and political background, the two ruling parties of Taiwan, Kuomintang (the National Party) and Minjintang (the Democratic Progress Party) are constantly engaging in political struggles. Mutual checks and balances are common factors in a democratic society, however if the ideological disputes are inappropriately exploited, the opposing views are taken to the extreme and people’s livelihood can only be negatively impacted as a result. This is what is happening in Taiwan right now. People of the same race and culture are split into opposing groups by ideological propagandas inspired by two parties. Disunity only results in degraded quality of life. The two characters of my story, Kuo (blue) and Min (green), are shown chased by a sea monster to an island. To quench their thirst, they cooperate to fetch the last few coconuts left on the island. When both of them wanted to possess the biggest coconut, they begin a fight that almost results in their death—completely unaware that the sea monster is still lurking in the water, waiting to swallow them. At last, they realize that the only chance of survival is through collaboration. They relinquish their dispute, team up together, defeat the sea monster, break the coconut with the monster’s teeth, and share the sweet coconut juice. Through my animation, I wish to convey to my audience the simple idea that mutual tolerance and cooperation are vital for all of us sharing this tiny planet, particularly for those of us from Taiwan. It is only through mutual tolerance and co-effort can we make our tiny home a better place to live

Reading the Emotions of Salome: Sympathy for the Devil or Fear and Loathing

In October 1876 Gustave Flaubert was engaged in writing what would become perhaps his most well-known and successful piece of short fiction, A Simple Heart. This narrative dissects the life of an innocent servant woman, ironically named Felicity, who rransfers her love and spiritual devotion from object to object until she finally settles, afrer life\u27s many disappointments, on a stuffed and tattered parrot as the incarnation of her god of love. The horror of Flaubert\u27s story can be located in his dark and cynical portrayal of love and spiritual devotion as a form of fetishism, a mad scramble for apparently random substitute objects to compensate for the original wound in the psyche, the primordial fall we all supposedly make from a sense of original wholeness and self-sufficiency within the individual ego into psychic fragmentation. Felicity\u27s pathetic stuffed parrot functions as a fetish, while fetishism-or the displacement of the sexual object by a metonymic substitute-stands in Flaubert as the originating source of both love and religious worship