Volumetric Cloud Rendering: An Animation of Clouds

This paper demonstrates a production workflow for a volumetric-rendering-based short animation about clouds. The animation is based on the concept of a giant fish swimming in the sky from Zhuangzi\u27s philosophical story. The algorithm and implementation for the modeling and rendering of clouds are also presented. A renderer was developed that uses the OpenVDB library for data storage, fast retrieving and grid manipulation. A user-friendly pipeline was also developed for cloud modeling and rendering, which used Python and XML for adjusting rendering parameters. The pipeline includes Maya to build the rough cloud model and Houdini to calculate the interior light points. Final compositing was done in Nuke. Several MEL and Python scripts were also used to retrieve camera and light information from Maya and Houdini, thereby facilitating the production process

Markkinointivideon digitaalinen animaatio

Insinöörityön tarkoituksena oli tutkia digitaalisten animaatiotekniikoiden käyttöä ja niiden suhdetta perinteiseen animaatioon. Työssä tutkittiin perinteisen, käsin piirretyn animaation periaatteita ja sitä, miten hyvin ne soveltuvat digitaaliseen animaatioon käytännössä. Osana insinöörityötä toteutettiin animaatiomateriaalia lyhyelle markkinointivideolle, jonka tilaajana oli ulkopuolinen asiakas. Videon tavoitteena on tiedon jakaminen kantasolujenluovutusprosessista ja lisäksi ihmisten kannustaminen luovuttamaan kantasoluja. Insinöörityössä käsitellään ulkopuoliselle asiakkaalle toteutettavan pienen budjetin animaa-tiovideotuotannon prosessia. Työssä perehdyttiin markkinointivideon toteutuksen eri vaiheisiin suunnittelusta lopputulokseen 3D-animaattorin näkökulmasta. Työssä tarkastellaan myös jonkin verran digitaalista 2D-animaatiota ja sen tekemistä, sillä yksi insinöörityössä tuotetuista videoklipeistä tehtiin käyttäen 2D-animaatiota ja yksi käyttäen sekatekniikkaa. Toteutetut 3D-animaatiot ovat pääasiassa lääketieteellistä materiaalia. Animaatiot tuotettiin 3D-mallinnusohjelmalla. Useiden kohtausten toteutuksessa päätettiin hyödyntää erityisesti työkalua, jolla voi laittaa objektin muuttamaan muotoaan kesken animaation. Insinöörityön lopputuloksena syntyi neljä lyhyttä animaatiovideota. Videot olivat osana asiakkaan virallisilla sivuilla ja Facebook-sivulla julkaistua markkinointivideota, jossa käytettiin 3D-, 2D- ja hybridianimaation lisäksi myös näyteltyä materiaalia.The aim of this thesis is to study about digital animation techniques and compare them to traditional animation. This thesis will also introduce the principles that are originally meant for traditional animation and test in practice if they are still usable in the fields of digital animation. As a part of this thesis, animated material was produced to a stem cell donating campaign video. The video material in this thesis was produced mostly in 3D animation, but also some scenes were made in 2D animation and using mixed media techniques. The purpose of the video was to give out information of the donating process itself and also encourage people to donate stem cells. This thesis is written from the 3D-animator’s point of view in a small budget animation production for a client. The whole animation process is described from planning to the making of the actual animation. The thesis will also go briefly through the making process of two-dimensional animation, since one of the video clips was made in 2D and another one was made with blending 2D animation to 3D image. The animation sequences were mostly made using a 3D modeling program. Especially a modifier that makes objects change shape during an animation was used in different scenes. The end results of this thesis were four short animation clips that were used in the final product. The final product was a short video which was a combination of live action footage and video clips that were made using different digital animation techniques. The final video was successfully published on the client’s web site and Facebook page

The Evolution of Stop-motion Animation Technique Through 120 Years of Technological Innovations

Stop-motion animation history has been put on paper by several scholars and practitioners who tried to organize 120 years of technological innovations and material experiments dealing with a huge literature. Bruce Holman (1975), Neil Pettigrew (1999), Ken Priebe (2010), Stefano Bessoni (2014), and more recently Adrián Encinas Salamanca (2017), provided the most detailed even tough partial attempts of systematization, and designed historical reconstructions by considering specific periods of time, film lengths or the use of stop-motion as special effect rather than an animation technique. This article provides another partial historical reconstruction of the evolution of stop-motion and outlines the main events that occurred in the development of this technique, following criteria based on the innovations in the technology of materials and manufacturing processes that have influenced the fabrication of puppets until the present day. The systematization follows a chronological order and takes into account events that changed the technique of a puppets’ manufacturing process as a consequence of the use of either new fabrication processes or materials. Starting from the accident that made the French film-pioneer Georges Méliès discover the trick of the replacement technique at the end of the nineteenth century, the reconstruction goes through 120 years of experiments and films. “Build up” puppets fabricated by the Russian puppet animator Ladislaw Starevicz with insect exoskeletons, the use of clay puppets and the innovations introduced by LAIKA entertainment in the last decade such as Stereoscopic photography and the 3D computer printed replacement pieces, and then the increasing influence of digital technologies in the process of puppet fabrication are some of the main considered events. Technology transfers, new materials’ features, innovations in the way of animating puppets, are the main aspects through which this historical analysis approaches the previously mentioned events. This short analysis is supposed to remind and demonstrate that stop-motion animation is an interdisciplinary occasion of both artistic expression and technological experimentation, and that its evolution and aesthetic is related to cultural, geographical and technological issues. Lastly, if the technology of materials and processes is a constantly evolving field, what future can be expected for this cinematographic technique? The article ends with this open question and without providing an answer it implicitly states the role of stop-motion as a driving force for innovations that come from other fields and are incentivized by the needs of this specific sector

Lockers

The production of the thesis film ‘Lockers’ was not an easy birth. The first proposed story that was accepted by the Thesis committee was discarded as being too technically ambitious. There was then a protracted effort to develop a new, producible thesis Story proposal that met the committee’s requirements. Once an acceptable thesis proposal was developed, the writer then attempted to refine the story; writing over forty drafts in order to reduce the elements of the story into something that made the artistic and narrative statements as well as being technically viable. Working in the professional world of animation while simultaneously working on the production of the thesis helped as methodologies and techniques used by colleagues provided solutions to technical issues as they came up. The issues that did present themselves were not centered around the animation itself but of rigging and modeling problems and challenges getting the animation from one software package to another. Also as lighting and rendering of shots is relatively ‘uncharted territory’, developing desired ‘processor-cheap’ but effective illumination solutions was especially challenging. The total production time pushed on for four to five years, and throughout the process, the story’s theme of confronting one’s fears and overcoming them was the intended message. However, as the production came to a close, another theme became as equally clear to me. The film was indeed about fear and confronting it but it also was about living in the present moment, avoiding getting caught up in the past and realizing that forward movement is the only clear way to redemption. As the film screened in Grad screenings, the struggles and challenges that made up a large part of this film’s production process became entwined, for me at least, in the film’s final meaning

gMotion: A spatio-temporal grammar for the procedural generation of motion graphics

Creating by hand compelling 2D animations that choreograph several groups of shapes requires a large number of manual edits. We present a method to procedurally generate motion graphics with timeslice grammars. Timeslice grammars are to time what split grammars are to space. We use this grammar to formally model motion graphics, manipulating them in both temporal and spatial components. We are able to combine both these aspects by representing animations as sets of affine transformations sampled uniformly in both space and time. Rules and operators in the grammar manipulate all spatio-temporal matrices as a whole, allowing us to expressively construct animation with few rules. The grammar animates shapes, which are represented as highly tessellated polygons, by applying the affine transforms to each shape vertex given the vertex position and the animation time. We introduce a small set of operators showing how we can produce 2D animations of geometric objects, by combining the expressive power of the grammar model, the composability of the operators with themselves, and the capabilities that derive from using a unified spatio-temporal representation for animation data. Throughout the paper, we show how timeslice grammars can produce a wide variety of animations that would take artists hours of tedious and time-consuming work. In particular, in cases where change of shapes is very common, our grammar can add motion detail to large collections of shapes with greater control over per-shape animations along with a compact rules structure

Jerry Fireman: Modeling Characters for a 1930s Cartoon

Jerry Fireman is concept for a 3D animated cartoon that is based on the style of early 1900s cartoons. It is inspired by the pioneers in early animation, Fleischer Studios and Walt Disney, and designed with the intent to educate people on the social and political environments that influenced the production of cartoons during the 1920s and 30s. During the development of this concept, I investigate different modeling techniques to represent the main stylistic elements of these early animated drawings in a 3D form, and I compare the possible modeling workflows for advantages and disadvantages in this process. In this document I present a summary of the period of influences and my design and models. Rendered poses are also included as a proof of concept

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

Material Thermal Inputs of Iowa Materials for MEPDG, 2011

The thermal properties of concrete materials, such as coeffi cient of thermal expansion (CTE), thermal conductivity, and heat capacity, are required by the MEPDG program as the material inputs for pavement design. However, a limited amount of test data is available on the thermal properties of concrete in Iowa. The default values provided by the MEPDG program may not be suitable for Iowa concrete, since aggregate characteristics have signifi cant infl uence on concrete thermal properties