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Unit-8

Computer Animation

8.1 Overview
Motion can bring the simplest of characters to life. Even simple polygonal shapes can convey
a number of human qualities when animated: identity, character, gender, mood, intention,
emotion, and so on. Very simple

Very simple characters (image by Ken Perlin)

A movie is a sequence of frames of still images. For video, the frame rate is typically 24 frames
per second. For film, this is 30 frames per second.
Copyright c

In general, animation may be achieved by specifying a model with n parameters that identify
degrees of freedom that an animator may be interested in such as
• polygon vertices,

• spline control,

• joint angles,

• muscle contraction,

• camera parameters, or

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• color.
With n parameters, this results in a vector ~q in n-dimensional state space. Parameters may be
varied to generate animation. A model’s motion is a trajectory through its state space or a set of
motion curves for each parameter over time, i.e. ~q(t), where t is the time of the current frame.
Every animation technique reduces to specifying the state space trajectory.
The basic animation algorithm is then: for t=t1 to tend: render(~q(t)).
Modeling and animation are loosely coupled. Modeling describes control values and their
actions.
Animation describes how to vary the control values. There are a number of animation
techniques,
including the following:
• User driven animation
– Keyframing
– Motion capture
• Procedural animation
– Physical simulation
– Particle systems
– Crowd behaviors
• Data-driven animation

8.2 Keyframing
Keyframing is an animation technique where motion curves are interpolated through states at
times, (~q1, ..., ~qT ), called keyframes, specified by a user

Catmull-Rom splines are well suited for keyframe animation because they pass through their
control points.

• Pros:
– Very expressive

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– Animator has complete control over all motion parameters

• Cons:

Very labor intensive

– Difficult to create convincing physical realism
• Uses:
– Potentially everything except complex physical phenomena such as smoke, water, or
fire

8.3 Kinematics
Kinematics describe the properties of shape and motion independent of physical forces that
cause motion. Kinematic techniques are used often in keyframing, with an animator either setting
joint parameters explicitly with forward kinematics or specifying a few key joint orientations
and having the rest computed automatically with inverse kinematics.
16.3.1 Forward Kinematics
With forward kinematics, a point ¯p is positioned by ¯p = f(_) where_is a state vector (θ1,
θ2, ...θn)
specifying the position, orientation, and rotation of all joints.

For the above example, ¯p = (l1 cos(θ1) + l2 cos(θ1 + θ2), l1 sin(θ1) + l2 sin(θ1 +
θ2)).
Inverse Kinematics
With inverse kinematics, a user specifies the position of the end effector, ¯p, and the algorithm
has to evaluate the required _ give ¯p. That is, _ = f−1(¯p).
Usually, numerical methods are used to solve this problem, as it is often nonlinear and either
underdetermined or overdetermined. A system is underdetermined when there is not a unique
solution, such as when there are more equations than unknowns. A system is overdetermined
when it is inconsistent and has no solutions.
Extra constraints are necessary to obtain unique and stable solutions. For example, constraints
may be placed on the range of joint motion and the solution may be required to minimize the
kinetic energy of the system.
8.3.1 Motion Capture
In motion capture, an actor has a number of small, round markers attached to his or her body
that reflect light in frequency ranges that motion capture cameras are specifically designed to
pick up

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image from movement.nyu.edu)

With enough cameras, it is possible to reconstruct the position of the markers accurately in 3D.
In practice, this is a laborious process. Markers tend to be hidden from cameras and 3D
reconstructions fail, requiring a user to manually fix such drop outs. The resulting motion curves
are often noisy, requiring yet more effort to clean up the motion data to more accurately match
what an animator wants. Despite the labor involved, motion capture has become a popular
technique in the movie and game industries, as it allows fairly accurate animations to be created
from the motion of actors. However, this is limited by the density of markers that can be placed
on a single actor. Faces, for example, are still very difficult to convincingly reconstruct.

Pros:
– Captures specific style of real actors
• Cons:
– Often not expressive enough
– Time consuming and expensive
– Difficult to edit
• Uses:
– Character animation
– Medicine, such as kinesiology and biomechanics

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