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High Level Motion Authoring for Articulated Figures. http://www.columbia.edu/~msw2103/cs4167/. Michael Wasserman & Michael Ilardi. Concept. What if you could just tell your articulated figure to walk or wave its hand?
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High Level Motion Authoring for Articulated Figures http://www.columbia.edu/~msw2103/cs4167/ Michael Wasserman & Michael Ilardi
Concept • What if you could just tell your articulated figure to walk or wave its hand? • Using a timeline interface, an artist could “paint” animations onto an articulated figure. • Using Maya this could be rendered as a 3D animation for some given hierarchical bone structure.
Demo • Using these simple commands: • takepose posename rootofpose • (Timeline editing) • takeplist plistname • Produce this animation: • (Play clips)
Tools • Maya – Professional level modeling and animation software • MEL – Maya’s Embedded (scripting) Language • Maya API – Application Programming Interface (C++, plug-ins) • Our tools • Skeleton and Skin – Gimbal rotations, root translations, and subd. • Setpose – A plug-in used to record information about the state of the articulated figure to a .pose file • Timeline – Graphical interface for creating .plist and .anim files from .pose and .anim files (hierarchical, open, manipulate, save, export) • Takeplist – A plug-in to apply a .plist scene to the articulated figure
Conclusion • Both of us realized that tackling the intricacies of Maya’s scripting language, API, and the plethora of data structures required to administrate an animation (and give it a graphic interface) was a much larger project than originally thought. • As such, we were compelled to use Maya’s internal interpolation algorithms, not our own. • IK vs. FK tradeoffs