Animated Film Production Process: The Creation of Lighting for Gear Up

The following thesis details the creation of a shot for an animated production titled Gear Up. The process for creating this shot was patterned after professional animated productions and included the following steps: pre-visualization, story boarding, modeling and asset creation, UV layouts, texturing and surfacing, scene assembly and camera layout, character and prop rigging, character animation, lighting, rendering, and compositing. The motivation for this project was to create a product that artistically has a darker aesthetic than many previous Clemson DPA animations, but still enjoyed high quality visuals. One of the goals was to create a large-scale scene centered in a post apocalyptic robot war. This project also served as the first opportunity for incorporating the rendering engine called Arnold into the Clemson DPA animation pipeline and artist workflow. In order to accomplish the goals set above, a series of technical and artistic problems needed to be solved. With the use of 3D preproduction prototyping, modular and procedural asset gen-eration, new content generation tools, and optimized workflows, the team was able to tackle all production challenges and create high quality content efficiently and with minimal stress to the artists. This thesis also delves into the elaborate process of scene lighting; detailing the artistic decisions and motivations that lead to the final product. The lighting is created by examining references from film and real life, lighting designs, and advanced lighting techniques. The results of the project was a 400 frame animation of a post apocalyptic city block featuring a detailed robot, armed for war, standing guard by his tank amidst piles of debris, barbed wire, and rubble. The shot was rendered entirely in Arnold apart from the FX elements, which was rendered using Houdini Mantra. It also represents a successful collaboration between several volunteer artists with various skills and time commitments

Intercept: Crafting a Live-Action VFX Short Film with Limited Resources

This thesis describes Intercept, an ongoing science-fiction short film production, involving the integration of a fully computer-generated character, as well as other digital effects, within a live-action setting. The thesis encompasses all aspects of the filmmaking process: from conception, design, and development, to the execution of principal photography, and into post-production. This endeavor is inspired by the work of Sam Gorski and Niko Pueringer of CorridorDigital, Ferand Peek, and Neill Blomkamp, in their exemplification of the ever-increasing ability of contemporary filmmakers to craft high-fidelity visual effects, within a live-action context, in spite of limited access to resources such as equipment, personnel, and finances. The narrative was developed from the concept of a futuristic thief and his accomplice, a robotic dog, attempting to infiltrate and escape from a secure facility. The pre-production and production of the film have thus far spanned approximately eight months, and have involved a small cast and crew of student volunteers from multiple disciplines, collaboration with other university departments, and crowdfunded financial support

Web based Data visualization for an Immersive 3D Therapy Game for Treating Hemispatial Neglect

Neglect affects an estimated one in four individuals who experience a stroke. Because of its association with overall stroke severity, individuals with neglect tend to have poorer prognosis for recovery. Treatment of neglect in acute stroke can yield greater recovery of a person’s ability to successfully perform activities of daily living. However, most individuals have insufficient access to effective treatments. Hemi-spatial neglect is a type of brain problem after stroke that people with this problem is living in a one-side world, which means they can only recognize one side of the object they see in their eyes, and automatically ignored the other side. Current existed treatment which is called Constraint Induced Movement Therapy (CI therapy) is to Hemi-spatial neglect is having the patient staying at hospital and repeat being forced to look at the side they tend to ignore by a doctor. This traditional treatment for hemi-spatial neglect is very tedious and a repetition of a motor practice thus has little effect on patients. Recently, game-based treatments for neglect have shown some important progress. We, as a team, designed an immersive 3D video game, which has very user-friendly interface and driven by eye gaze, in order to train them to look at the other side so that they may get a better chance to recover as normal people. This will provide direct, intensive, and implicit training of visual attention, while enabling real-time assessment of performance and feedback. The game is calibrated with The Eye Tribe Eye Tracker as a monitor to the movement of eyeballs and based on 3D modeling technology: Autodesk Maya with the assistance of Adobe Photoshop for creating game assets, and imported them to the Unreal Game Engine 4.0 and program the game with C++ and BluePrint visualized language.No embargoAcademic Major: Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Virtual Heritage

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments

Virtual Heritage

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments

New Game Physics - Added Value for Transdisciplinary Teams

This study focused on game physics, an area of computer game design where physics is applied in interactive computer software. The purpose of the research was a fresh analysis of game physics in order to prove that its current usage is limited and requires advancement. The investigations presented in this dissertation establish constructive principles to advance game physics design. The main premise was that transdisciplinary approaches provide significant value. The resulting designs reflected combined goals of game developers, artists and physicists and provide novel ways to incorporate physics into games. The applicability and user impact of such new game physics across several target audiences was thoroughly examined. In order to explore the transdisciplinary nature of the premise, valid evidence was gathered using a broad range of theoretical and practical methodologies. The research established a clear definition of game physics within the context of historical, technological, practical, scientific, and artistic considerations. Game analysis, literature reviews and seminal surveys of game players, game developers and scientists were conducted. A heuristic categorization of game types was defined to create an extensive database of computer games and carry out a statistical analysis of game physics usage. Results were then combined to define core principles for the design of unconventional new game physics elements. Software implementations of several elements were developed to examine the practical feasibility of the proposed principles. This research prototype was exposed to practitioners (artists, game developers and scientists) in field studies, documented on video and subsequently analyzed to evaluate the effectiveness of the elements on the audiences. The findings from this research demonstrated that standard game physics is a common but limited design element in computer games. It was discovered that the entertainment driven design goals of game developers interfere with the needs of educators and scientists. Game reviews exemplified the exaggerated and incorrect physics present in many commercial computer games. This “pseudo physics” was shown to have potentially undesired effects on game players. Art reviews also indicated that game physics technology remains largely inaccessible to artists. The principal conclusion drawn from this study was that the proposed new game physics advances game design and creates value by expanding the choices available to game developers and designers, enabling artists to create more scientifically robust artworks, and encouraging scientists to consider games as a viable tool for education and research. The practical portion generated tangible evidence that the isolated “silos” of engineering, art and science can be bridged when game physics is designed in a transdisciplinary way. This dissertation recommends that scientific and artistic perspectives should always be considered when game physics is used in computer-based media, because significant value for a broad range of practitioners in succinctly different fields can be achieved. The study has thereby established a state of the art research into game physics, which not only offers other researchers constructive principles for future investigations, but also provides much-needed new material to address the observed discrepancies in game theory and digital media design

Atmospheric cloud modeling methods in computer graphics: A review, trends, taxonomy, and future directions

The modeling of atmospheric clouds is one of the crucial elements in the natural phenomena visualization system. Over the years, a wide range of approaches has been proposed on this topic to deal with the challenging issues associated with visual realism and performance. However, the lack of recent review papers on the atmospheric cloud modeling methods available in computer graphics makes it difficult for researchers and practitioners to understand and choose the well-suited solutions for developing the atmospheric cloud visualization system. Hence, we conducted a comprehensive review to identify, analyze, classify, and summarize the existing atmospheric cloud modeling solutions. We selected 113 research studies from recognizable data sources and analyzed the research trends on this topic. We defined a taxonomy by categorizing the atmospheric cloud modeling methods based on the methods' similar characteristics and summarized each of the particular methods. Finally, we underlined several research issues and directions for potential future work. The review results provide an overview and general picture of the atmospheric cloud modeling methods that would be beneficial for researchers and practitioners

NOTIFICATION !!!

All the content of this special edition is retrieved from the conference proceedings published by the European Scientific Institute, ESI. http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/pages/view/books The European Scientific Journal, ESJ, after approval from the publisher re publishes the papers in a Special edition