Digital production pipelines: examining structures and methods in the computer effects industry

Computer animated films require collaboration: blending artistic concept with technical skill, meeting budget constraints and adhering to deadlines. The path which production follows from initial idea to finished product is known as the pipeline. The purpose of this thesis is to collect, study and share information regarding production pipeline practices and to derive a conceptual definition. Research focused on selected companies in the United States which have produced at least one feature-length computer generated film and continue to produce them. The key finding of this thesis is a conceptual definition of digital production pipelines: A digital production pipeline must, by definition, utilize digital computing hardware and software to facilitate human work and collaboration for the overarching purpose of producing content for film. The digital production pipeline is not a structure, but rather a malleable set of components which can be arranged, configured, and adapted into new structures as needed. These malleable components are human groups with assigned task domains, and digital hardware and software systems. The human groups are normally referred to as departments or teams. The digital hardware and software systems are operating systems, software tools and applications, networks, processors, and storage. The digital production pipeline is the synergy of these two types of components into adaptable systems and structures

The Soprants: conceptual and technical framework for a 3D interactive video game

This thesis covers the design of an interactive 3D video game with certain unique features and demonstrates the design through a prototype implementation. Insect characters are modeled after human characters and set in a game story. The ants in the game behave similar to leaf-cutter ants. A 3D game environment based on a real ant colony nest is created and used for prototyping the game. Insect behavior based on behavior of real ants is implemented in an interactive 3D environment. The cinematic scenes and the trailer of the game are created to present the game story

Towards Infinity And Beyond Branding, Reputation, and the Critical Reception of Pixar Animation Studios

American author and journalist Jonah Lehrer declared in 2012 that Pixar Animation Studios was ‘the one exception’ to the oft-cited maxim that, in Hollywood, ‘nobody knows anything.’ Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times spoke in similar terms in 2008, writing that, ‘critics and audiences are in agreement on one key thing: Nobody makes better movies than Pixar.’ Thirteen consecutive global box office successes and scores of industry awards would seem to suggest that Lehrer and Goldstein are correct. Yet it is important to recognise that such statements invariably refer to something intangible, something beyond a particular Pixar film or selection of films. There exists, in other words, a widely held set of meanings and associations about what the studio represents, and to whom. This thesis argues that this set of meanings and associations – Pixar’s brand identity – is far from the fixed and unambiguous entity it is often seen to be. If the studio has come to be seen as guarantee of quality family entertainment, when did this notion become widespread? Have the parameters for ‘quality’ and ‘success’ remained constant throughout its history? I demonstrate for instance that Pixar benefited considerably from Disney’s wavering reputation from the late-1990s onwards. I approach branding as a discursive process, and one that brand producers sometimes have little control over, contrary to the implicit claims of most marketing literature. Broadly chronological in structure, the thesis traces the development of the studio’s reputation by drawing on Barbara Klinger’s approach to historical reception studies. Individual chapters focus on how Pixar was discussed by critics and journalists at specific moments or in specific contexts, as it evolved from a computer graphics company to become the most celebrated film studio of all time. Ultimately, this is a case study of the cultural work involved in the making of a brand or an auteur, and how these meanings can shift over time

Crowd modeling: generation of a fully articulated crowd of characters

In this thesis I present a fast, efficient, and production friendly method to generate a crowd of fully articulated characters. A wide variety of characters can be created from a relatively few base models. The models that are generated are anatomically different from each another, while maintaining the same topology. They all have individual characteristics and features, that distinguish them from the others in the crowd. This method is easily adaptable to different kinds of characters, from hyper-realistic characters to highly stylized characters, and from human characters to insects like spiders. The crowd character models generated by this method are fully articulated and are ready to be animated

Der computeranimierte Spielfilm: Forschungen zur Inszenierung und Klassifizierung des 3-D-Computer-Trickfilms

Die Computeranimation beginnt seit einigen Jahren, neben dem Zeichentrick- und dem Puppentrickfilm das Kino zu erobern. Vollständig auf dem Computer entstandene Filme drängen die klassischen Trickfilmsparten zurück. Doch wie entstehen diese Filme? Dieses Buch gibt Einblicke in ihre Entwicklung und zeigt auf, wie Figuren und Drehorte entstehen, wie Kamera, Licht und Animation auf dem Computer eingesetzt werden. Neben der Inszenierung von computergenerierten Trickfilmen werden darüber hinaus Historie und Entwicklung nachgezeichnet, bekannte Filmbeispiele analysiert, bestehende Theorien über 3-D-Computeranimation vorgestellt und die Stellung dieser neuartigen Gattung im Genre des Trickfilms bestimmt

Hierarchical model for real time simulation of virtual human crowds

This paper describes a model for simulating crowds of humans in real time. We deal with a hierarchy composed of virtual crowds, groups, and individuals. The groups are the most complex structure that can be controlled in different degrees of autonomy. This autonomy refers to the extent to which the virtual agents are independent of user intervention and also the amount of information needed to simulate crowds. Thus, depending on the complexity of the simulation, simple behaviors can be sufficient to simulate crowds. Otherwise, more complicated behavioral rules can be necessary and, in this case, it can be included in the simulation data in order to improve the realism of the animation. We present three different ways for controlling crowd behaviors: 1) by using innate and scripted behaviors, 2) by defining behavioral rules, using events and reactions, and 3) by providing an external control to guide crowd behaviors in real time. The two main contributions of our approach are: The possibility of increasing the complexity of group/agent behaviors according to the problem to be simulated and the hierarchical structure based on groups to compose a crowd

Spartan Daily, May 4, 2005

Volume 124, Issue 62https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10134/thumbnail.jp

A Motion Control Scheme for Animating Expressive Arm Movements

Current methods for figure animation involve a tradeoff between the level of realism captured in the movements and the ease of generating the animations. We introduce a motion control paradigm that circumvents this tradeoff-it provides the ability to generate a wide range of natural-looking movements with minimal user labor. Effort, which is one part of Rudolf Laban\u27s system for observing and analyzing movement, describes the qualitative aspects of movement. Our motion control paradigm simplifies the generation of expressive movements by proceduralizing these qualitative aspects to hide the non-intuitive, quantitative aspects of movement. We build a model of Effort using a set of kinematic movement parameters that defines how a figure moves between goal keypoints. Our motion control scheme provides control through Effort\u27s four dimensional system of textual descriptors, providing a level of control thus far missing from behavioral animation systems and offering novel specification and editing capabilities on top of traditional keyframing and inverse kinematics methods. Since our Effort model is inexpensive computationally, Effort-based motion control systems can work in real-time. We demonstrate our motion control scheme by implementing EMOTE (Expressive MOTion Engine), a character animation module for expressive arm movements. EMOTE works with inverse kinematics to control the qualitative aspects of end-effector specified movements. The user specifies general movements by entering a sequence of goal positions for each hand. The user then expresses the essence of the movement by adjusting sliders for the Effort motion factors: Space, Weight, Time, and Flow. EMOTE produces a wide range of expressive movements, provides an easy-to-use interface (that is more intuitive than joint angle interpolation curves or physical parameters), features interactive editing, and real-time motion generation

Daily Eastern News: February 20, 1976

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/den_1976_feb/1015/thumbnail.jp