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

Sketching-out virtual humans: A smart interface for human modelling and animation

In this paper, we present a fast and intuitive interface for sketching out 3D virtual humans and animation. The user draws stick figure key frames first and chooses one for “fleshing-out” with freehand body contours. The system automatically constructs a plausible 3D skin surface from the rendered figure, and maps it onto the posed stick figures to produce the 3D character animation. A “creative model-based method” is developed, which performs a human perception process to generate 3D human bodies of various body sizes, shapes and fat distributions. In this approach, an anatomical 3D generic model has been created with three distinct layers: skeleton, fat tissue, and skin. It can be transformed sequentially through rigid morphing, fatness morphing, and surface fitting to match the original 2D sketch. An auto-beautification function is also offered to regularise the 3D asymmetrical bodies from users’ imperfect figure sketches. Our current system delivers character animation in various forms, including articulated figure animation, 3D mesh model animation, 2D contour figure animation, and even 2D NPR animation with personalised drawing styles. The 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

Lotte Reiniger’s career in animation and her first full-­‐length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on May 22, 2015Thesis advisor: Burton DunbarVitaIncludes bibliographic references (pages 66-76)Thesis (M.A.)--Department of Art and Art History, 2014Lotte Reiniger was the woman responsible for making the world’s first full-­‐length animated film, Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926). Along with her collaborators, she worked on the film for three years during the era of the Weimar Republic in Germany. The Adventures of Prince Achmed was shown in theatres all over the world including Berlin, France, London, New York, and Tokyo, and was always met with many positive reviews. Reiniger’s career was a long and prominent one, but her work is virtually unknown outside of animation studies. While there is not a lack of materials written on Reiniger and her work, there is still very little assessment of her accomplishments. The purpose of this thesis is to establish the art historical significance of Reiniger’s career, specifically that of The Adventures of Prince Achmed. This thesis treats Lotte Reiniger and the artists who collaborated on her films, their animation techniques, and how their films were made. Reviews from The Adventures of Prince Achmed’s earliest showings and Reiniger’s contemporaries’ assessments of her workmake it clear that she was a brilliant artist. I compare The Adventures of Prince Achmed with other animated films being made at the time, and consider the artists that have been inspired by Reiniger’s work up to the present in order to more fully assess the impact of the film on historically significant forms of film art.College of Arts and SciencesIntroduction -- Animation: definitions and explanations -- Lotte Reiniger's bibliography -- The Weimar Republic in Germany -- The Arabian Nights and the narrative of the Adventures of Prince Achmend -- The making of The Adventures of Prince Achmed -- The Adventures of Prince Achmed's premiere -- Reiniger's contribution to animation -- Conclusionmonographi

Ink-and-Ray: Bas-Relief Meshes for Adding Global Illumination Effects to Hand-Drawn Characters

We present a new approach for generating global illumination renderings of hand-drawn characters using only a small set of simple annotations. Our system exploits the concept of bas-relief sculptures, making it possible to generate 3D proxies suitable for rendering without requiring side-views or extensive user input. We formulate an optimization process that automatically constructs approximate geometry sufficient to evoke the impression of a consistent 3D shape. The resulting renders provide the richer stylization capabilities of 3D global illumination while still retaining the 2D handdrawn look-and-feel. We demonstrate our approach on a varied set of handdrawn images and animations, showing that even in comparison to ground truth renderings of full 3D objects, our bas-relief approximation is able to produce convincing global illumination effects, including self-shadowing, glossy reflections, and diffuse color bleeding