CmpE 195A Project

1. CmpE 195A Project Character Animation Tool (The C.A.T. Project) By: Huáscar A. Sánchez, Dr. Mohamed E. Fayad

2. Game Rules • The team designated for this project must have the following qualities: • Hardworking • Involved • Communicative • Programming Experience • Modeling Experience • And Explorer Does your Team have these qualities?.....

3. Character Animation Process • Character Animation is a complex process that takes large amounts of time, and a lot of interactions among its practitioners. • This process uses skilled artists to manually pose characters using tools such as 3D Studio Max, Maya or Poser, etc.

4. Increasing demands placed on computer graphics for better looking 3D scenes. More involved characters’ level of details. Its delivery time has been Shrunk. To overcome these Problems some Character animation techniques were greatly necessary: Kinematics Motion capture technologies. Layered Modeling. Key Frame Animation. Etc. Current Concerns in the Area Alternatives For your Information: To meet the demands of modern character animation many production houses have invested in research for better motion capture technologies, that helps reduce the time and complexity of common character animation processes.

5. Animation Techniques - Outcome • Kinematics:Kinematics focus on character positioning and animation process. It reduces the delivery time in which a character is animated. • Motion Capture Techniques:They emphasized in the utilization of real actors to overcome the problem of complex character’s posture configuration by simply recording the desired behavior or motion of particular actors in a defined environment, thereby reducing the need of artists to manually position characters. • Layered Modeling:Using this approach the animator divides the simulation model into a number of discrete layers, each with its own physical and geometric properties. The animator specifies the various constraint relationships between the layers and can then control the global motion from a high level. • Key-Frame Animation:The animator defines a set of key-frames, which act like constraints, to derive smooth deformation that preserves the structure of the original motion. Many different realistic motions can be derived from a single captured motion sequence using only a few key-frames to specify the motion warp. For your Information: These are some of the most common techniques utilized to animated characters.

6. Current Work - Examples • The use of motion capture data and, the less common, posing techniques to animate computer characters has been used in television commercials to promote such products as Coke Cola and Barbie[1], movie productions, such as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within[2] and computer games. Examples of the use of motion capture data in computer games can be seen in Actua Soccer 2[3], Fifa 2001[4] and the Tomb Raider series[5]. The success of motion capture has led to a number of production houses that can record and provide motion data[6], however many companies have developed their own file format. This means that file formats of motion capture data are far from standard, however the ASCII nature of many of the formats make it reasonably easy to decode and understand by simple inspection of the data. The following illustration shows one the most common tools use to animate characters and distinct real and unreal subjects. This tool is part of 3D Studio Max (Character Studio) [1] House of Moves Motion Capture Studio, http://www.moves.com [2] Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, http://www.finalfantasy.com [3] Actua Soccer 2, Gremlin Interactive, http://actuaweb.gamestats.com/as2 [4] Fifa 2001, Electronic Arts, http://fifa2001.ea.com [5] Tomb Raider, Core Design Incorporated, http://www.tombraider.com [6] Production houses that supply motion capture data include BioVision, http://www.biovision.com, Motion Analysis, http://www.motionanalysis.com and House of Moves, http://www.moves.com

7. C.A.T. Project Description • The purpose for this project is to develop a tool for character animation, focusing of Character Animation major techniques. • These techniques should be included as main features of the Character Animation Tool. • They will provide to the artist the enough flexibility to express his/her unlimited imagination into a well-defined/detailed 3D digital representation of a character and/or environment. • For this project, the captured subject can be anything that exists either in the real world or our imagination, with the key points positioned on the subject/character such that they will accurately represent the distinct orientations of the moving parts of that particular subject (i.e. pivot points). • For this Project we will use Java Programming Language and UML.

8. C.A.T. Project Description- Continuation • This project will consist on several deliveries with specific deadlines. These deadlines will be stipulated by the class instructor and/or the project advisor. • Remember, this stable tool for character animation should cover and delivery the distinct techniques for character animation • The selected team for this project will be working with a moderator/project advisor who will help you to understand and get clarified about minor doubts on the project development. • At the end of the course, the selected team for this project must merge all the submitted documents into one whole document (including snapshots of the tool, some samples of the source code). Also, the team must submit a copy of the developed tool (CD) and be ready to show the working tool. C.A.T. Possible Process Flow Information – Domain Knowledge

9. Who is interested? • Any Question? • Please let me know if any Team is interested in this project. Thank You!