An Investigation into Animating Plant Structures within Real-time Constraints

This paper is an analysis of current developments in rendering botanical structures for scientic and entertainment purposes with a focus on visualising growth. The choices of practical investigations produce a novel approach for parallel parsing of difficult bracketed L-Systems, based upon the work of Lipp, Wonka and Wimmer (2010). Alongside this is a general overview of the issues involved when looking at growing systems, technical details involving programming for the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and other possible solutions for further work that also could achieve the project's goals

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

Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Group emotion modelling and the use of middleware for virtual crowds in video-games

In this paper we discuss the use of crowd simulation in video-games to augment their realism. Using previous works on emotion modelling and virtual crowds we define a game world in an urban context. To achieve that, we explore a biologically inspired human emotion model, investigate the formation of groups in crowds, and examine the use of physics middleware for crowds. Furthermore, we assess the realism and computational performance of the proposed approach. Our system runs at interactive frame-rate and can generate large crowds which demonstrate complex behaviour