COMPUTER-BASED ANIMATION

ANIMATION
To animate means to bring to life. Animation refers to changes in visual effects ranging from motion dynamics (time-varying positions), update dynamics (changes in shape, color, texture, structure, transparency etc. of object(s)), changes in camera position, lighting, focus. Computer-based animation refers to use of graphical tools by computer to produce visual effects.

The Heritage of Animation

The Early Days
Persistence of vision was discovered in the 1800s. This led to such devices as the zoetrope, or "wheel of life." The zoetrope has a short, fat cylinder which rotated on its axis of symmetry. Around the inside of the cylinder were a sequence of drawings, each one slightly different from the one next to it. The cylinder had long slits cut into its side in between each of the images so that when the cylinder was spun a slit would allow the eye to see the image on the oppose wall of the cylinder. As the cylinder was spun on its axis, the sequence of slits passing in front of the eye would present a sequence of images to the eye, creating the illusion of motion.

 Another low-tech animation piece of equipment was the flipbook. The flipbook was a tablet of paper with an individual drawing on each page so the viewer could flip through them. This was also popular in the 1800s. However, these devices were little more than parlor curiosities used for light entertainment. Studying the early days of conventional animation is interesting, the purpose for presenting an overview here is to gain an appreciation of the technological advances which drove the progress of animation in the beginning. The earliest hint of using a camera to make lifeless things appear to move was by Meleis in 1890 using simple tricks.

 The earliest pioneers in film animation were Emile Cohl, a Frenchman who produced several vignettes, J. Stuart Blackton, an American, who actually animated 'smoke' in a scene in 1900 and who is credited with the first animated cartoon in 1906, and the first celebrated animator, Winsor McCay, an American best known for his works Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur. Fleisher patented rotoscoping in 1915. Rotoscoping is drawing images on cells by tracing over previously recorded live action. Bray experimented with color in one 1920 short. During this time, animation as an art form was still struggling. The first animated character with an identifiable personality is Felix the Cat by Otto Messmer which appeared in the early 1920s in Pat Sullivan productions. In the late 1920s however, new forces had to be reckoned with: sound and Walt Disney.

BASIC CONCEPTS
Input process: Before computers can be used, drawings MUST be DIGITIZED because key frames (frames where entities are at extreme positions) MUST be drawn. This can be done through optical scanning, tracing drawing with data tablets etc. Drawings may need to be post processed (filtered) to clean glitches during input.

Categories of Computer Animation

There are two main categories of computer animation: computerassisted animation and computer generated animation. Computerassisted animation usually refers to 2D and 2 1/2 dimensional systems that computerize the traditional animation process. Interpolation between key shapes is typically the only algorithmic use of the computer in the production of this type of animation. For discussion purposes, motion specification for computergenerated animation is divided into two categories: low level techniques (techniques that aid the animator in precisely specifying motion), and high level techniques (techniques used to describe general motion behavior) .

Discussion on Two Techniques

Low level techniques consist of techniques, such as shape interpolation algorithms (in-betweening), which help the animator fill in the details of the motion once enough information about the motion has been specified by the animator. When using low level techniques, the animator usually has a fairly specific idea of the exact motion that he or she wants. High level techniques are typically algorithms or models used to generate a motion using a set of rules or constraints. The animator sets up the rules of the model, or chooses an appropriate algorithm.

Discussion on Animation
Images convey a lot of information because the human visual system is a sophisticated information processor. It follows, then, that moving images have the potential to convey much more information. Most animation, and specifically computer-generated animation, the animation is presented via film or video. This is possible because the eye-brain assembles a sequence of images and interprets them as a continuous movement. Persistence of motion is created by presenting a sequence of still images at a fast enough rate to induce the sensation of continuous motion. The only limitation on motion detection is the reaction time of those sensors and on certain mechanical limitations such as blinking and tracking. If an object moves fast enough, then the receptors in the eye will not be able to respond fast enough for the brain to distinguish a sharply defined, individual detail; motion blur results.

 In either film or video, a sequence of images is recorded which can be played back at rates fast enough to fool the eye into interpreting them as continuous motion. Of course, in order to save resources, this rate is kept as low as possible while still maintaining the persistence of motion. Under some viewing condition such as room lighting and viewing distance, the rate at which single images must be played back in order to maintain the perception of motion varies. The object appears as a rapid sequence of still images to the eye-brain.

 There are actually two rates that are of concern. One is the number of images per second that are displayed in the viewing process. The other, is the number of difference images that occur per second. The former is the playback rate; the latter is the sampling rate. For example, images may be played back at 30 images per second, but there may be only six different images per second with each image repeatedly displayed five times (e.g., some Saturday morning cartoons).

ANIMATION LANGUAGES
There are three categories: Linear-list Notations General-purpose Languages Graphical Languages

Linear list notations

Each event in an animation is described by a starting & ending frame number & an action that is to take place. The actions take parameter statements like: 42, 53, B, ROTATE, PALM 1, 30 The above statement means between frames 42 & 53, rotate the object called PALM about axis 1 by 30 deg. determining amount of rotation at each frame from table B. Many other such link lists are available

GENERAL PURPOSE LANGUAGES

Animation capability may be embedded within a general purpose programming language. The values of variables in the language can be used as parameters to the routines that perform the animation. ASAS is an example of such language built on LISP. Main entities are vectors, colors, polygons, solids, groups, points of views, light etc. ASAS also has wide range of geometric transformations that operate on objects. The ASAS program fragment below describes an animated sequence in which the object called my_cube is spun while the camera pans. The fragment is evaluated at each frame to generate the entire sequence. (grasp my_cube); The cube becomes the current object (cw 0.05); Spin it clockwise by a small amount (grasp camera); Make the camera the current object (right panning speed); Move it to the right

Graphical languages
With textual languages, we are unable to visualize the action just by looking at the script. A real time previewer would help to solve the problem for textual animation languages, however, real time animation is still beyond the scope of computer hardware. Graphical animation languages describe animation more visually. These languages express & edit the changes taking place in animation, Rather than explicitly writing out descriptions of actions, animator provides picture of the actions. Ex of such systems and languages are GENESYSTM ,DIAL & S-Dynamics System.

ANIMATION CONTROL METHODS

Full explicit control: Simplest control. The animator provides description of everything that occurs in the animation. It may specify:
Scaling, translation, rotation Provide key-frame information & interpolation methods to use between frames. In an interactive system, may allow direct manipulation with a mouse, joystick, data glove or other input device.

Procedural control: Based on communication between various objects to determine its properties. In physically based systems, the position of one object may influence the motion of another like balls cannot pass through walls. In anchor based systems, the individual actors may pass their positions to the other actors to affect others behavior. Constraint based systems: Some objects in physical world move in straight lines but many move in a manner determined by other objects with which they are in contact. This compound motion may not be linear at all. Such motion may be modeled by constraints specifying an animated sequence. It is much easier than explicit control.

Tracking line action: Trajectories of objects in the course of an animation may be generated by tracking live action. Traditional animation uses Rotoscoping. A film is made in which people/animals act out parts of characters in the animation & then the animators draw over the film enhancing the background & replacing human actors with their animated equivalents. Kinematics & Dynamics: Kinematics refers to position & velocity of points. A kinematic description of a scene: The cube is at the origin at time t = 0. It moves with a constant acceleration in the direction (1, 1, 15) thereafter. On the contrary, dynamics takes into account the physical laws that govern kinematics like Newtons laws of motion etc. A particle moves with an acceleration proportional to the forces acting on it & the proportionality constant depends on the mass of the particle. The dynamic description of the particle would be At time t=0 secs, the cube is at position (0 m, 100m, 0 m). The cube has a mass of 100 gms. The force of gravity acts on the cube. The result of dynamic simulation of such a model is that the cube falls.

Display of animation
With raster systems, animation objects made up of graphical primitives like lines, polygon etc. must be scan converted to their pix-map in their frame buffer.
To show a rotating object, we can scan convert to pixmap successive views from slightly different positions, one after another. The scan conversion must be done at least 10 times/sec (preferably at 15-20 times/sec) to a reasonably smooth effect; hence a new image must be created in no more than 100 ms. From this 100 mS, a small portion is taken for scan conversion. If 75 mS is taken for scan conversion, only 25 mS is left for erasing & redrawing the complete object on the display which is not enough. To prevent this double buffering is done. The frame buffer is divided to two images each with half of the bits per pixel of overall frame buffer. Lets discuss an example with two halves of pixmap image0 & image1 .

Ex. Load look-up table to display values as background color. Scan convert object into image0 Load look-up table to display only image0 Repeat Scan convert object into image1 Load look-up table to display only image1 Rotate object data structure description Scan convert object into image0 Load look-up table to display only image0 Rotate object data structure description Until (termination condition)

If the rotating & scan converting takes time > 100mS, animation is slow but transition from one image to next appears instantaneous

CONCLUSION
The current development of workstations towards support of motion video and animation is progressing very quickly. Silicon graphics TM workstations(ex. IndigoTMXS24A, indigo Elan etc.) provide high quality color graphics displays, as well as video boards for capturing motion video. The major empathies in hardware (e.g. camera, video boards, workstations) is on achieving real-time motion video and computer-based animation. This allows researchers to achieve better results in human facial animation based on speech intonation, emotion and dialogue models (a research project in the Center for human modeling and Simulation at the University of Pennsylvania), 3-dimensional tracking, focus ranging, and precision measurement of objects from a 2-axis camera (a research project in the GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania) and others.