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Thursday, 5 February 2015

Realism in the future of computer animation

08:56 1

Realism in the future of computer animation

Realism in computer animation can mean making each frame look photorealistic, in the sense that the scene is rendered to resemble a photograph, or to making the animation of characters believable and lifelike. Computer animation can also be realistic with or without the photorealistic rendering.
One of the greatest challenges in computer animation has been creating human characters that look and move with the highest degree of realism. Many animated films instead feature characters who are anthropomorphic animals (Finding Nemo, Ice Age, Bolt, Madagascar, Over the Hedge, Rio, Kung Fu Panda, Alpha and Omega), machines (Cars,WALL-E, Robots), insects (Antz, A Bug's Life, The Ant Bully, Bee Movie), fantasy creatures and characters (Monsters, Inc., Shrek, TMNT, Brave, Epic), or humans with nonrealistic cartoon-like proportions (The Incredibles, Despicable Me, Up, Megamind, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Planet 51, Hotel Transylvania, Team Fortress 2).
Part of the difficulty in making pleasing, realistic human characters is the uncanny valley, the concept where (up to a point) the human audience tends to have an increasingly negative emotional response as a human replica looks and acts more and more human. Also, some materials that commonly appear in a scene such as cloth, foliage, fluids, and hair have proven more difficult to faithfully recreate and animate than others. Consequently, special software and techniques have been developed to better simulate these specific elements.
In theory, realistic computer animation can reach a point where it is indistinguishable from real action captured on film. When computer animation achieves this level of realism, it may have major repercussions for the film industry.[citation needed]
The goal of computer animation is not always to emulate live action as closely as possible. Computer animation can also be tailored to mimic or substitute for other types of animation, such as traditional stop-motion animation (as shown in Flushed Away or The Lego Movie). Some of the long-standing basic principles of animation, like squash & stretch, call for movement that is not strictly realistic, and such principles still see widespread application in computer animation.
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Modeling human faces

08:53 1

Modeling human faces

Main article: Computer facial animation
The realistic modeling of human facial features is both one of the most challenging and sought after elements in computer-generated imagery.Computer facial animation is a highly complex field where models typically include a very large number of animation variables. Historically speaking, the first SIGGRAPH tutorials on State of the art in Facial Animation in 1989 and 1990 proved to be a turning point in the field by bringing together and consolidating multiple research elements and sparked interest among a number of researchers.[3]
The Facial Action Coding System (with 46 action units, such as "lip bite" or "squint"), which had been developed in 1976, became a popular basis for many systems.[4] As early as 2001, MPEG-4 included 68 Face Animation Parameters (FAPs) for lips, jaws, etc., and the field has made significant progress since then and the use of facial microexpressionhas increased.[4][5]
In some cases, an affective space, such as the PAD emotional state model, can be used to assign specific emotions to the faces of avatars. In this approach, the PAD model is used as a high level emotional space and the lower level space is the MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters (FAP). A mid-level Partial Expression Parameters (PEP) space is then used to in a two level structure — the PAD-PEP mapping and the PEP-FAP translation model.[6]
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Computer animation development equipment

08:52 0

Computer animation development equipment

Computer animation can be created with a computer and an animation software. Some impressive animation can be achieved even with basic programs; however, the rendering can take a lot of time on an ordinary home computer. Because of this, video game animators tend to use low resolution and low polygon count renders so that the graphics can be rendered in real time on a home computer. Photorealistic animation would be impractical in this context.
Professional animators of movies, television, and video sequences on computer games make photorealistic animation with high detail. This level of quality for movie animation would take hundreds of years to create on a home computer. Instead, many powerful workstation computers are used. Graphics workstation computers use two-four processors, and they are a lot more powerful than an actual home computer and they are specialized for rendering. A large number of workstations (known as a render farm) are networked together to effectively act as a giant computer. The result is a computer-animated movie that can be completed in about one to five years (however, this process is not composed solely of rendering). A workstation typically costs $2,000-16,000 with the more expensive stations being able to render much faster due to the more technologically advanced hardware that they contain. Professionals also use digital movie cameras, motion or performance capture,bluescreens, film editing software, props, and other tools used for movie animation.
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Creating characters and objects on a computer

08:50 6

Creating characters and objects on a computer

3D computer animation combines 3D models of objects and programmed or hand "keyframed" movement. These models are constructed out of geometrical vertices, faces, and edges in a 3D coordinate system. Objects are sculpted much like real clay or plaster, working from general forms to specific details with various sculpting tools. Unless a 3D model is intended to be a solid color, it must be painted with "textures" for realism. A bone/joint animation system is set up to deform the CGI model (e.g., to make a humanoid model walk). In a process known as rigging, the virtual marionette is given various controllers and handles for controlling movement. Animation data can be created using motion capture, or keyframing by a human animator, or a combination of the two.
3D models rigged for animation may contain thousands of control points — for example, "Woody" in Pixar's Toy Story uses 700 specialized animation controllers. Rhythm and Hues Studios labored for two years to create Aslan in the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which had about 1,851 controllers (742 in the face alone). In the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, designers had to design forces of extreme weather with the help of video references and accurate meteorological facts. For the 2005 remake of King Kong, actor Andy Serkis was used to help designers pinpoint the gorilla's prime location in the shots and used his expressions to model "human" characteristics onto the creature. Serkis had earlier provided the voice and performance for Gollum in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
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Methods of animating virtual characters

08:49 0

Methods of animating virtual characters

In most 3D computer animation systems, an animator creates a simplified representation of a character's anatomy, which is analogous to a skeleton or stick figure. The position of each segment of the skeletal model is defined by animation variables, or Avars for short. In human and animal characters, many parts of the skeletal model correspond to the actual bones, but skeletal animation is also used to animate other things, such as facial features (though other methods for facial animation exist). The character "Woody" in Toy Story, for example, uses 700 Avars (100 in the face alone). The computer doesn't usually render the skeletal model directly (it is invisible), but it does use the skeletal model to compute the exact position and orientation of that certain character, which is eventually rendered into an image. Thus by changing the values of Avars over time, the animator creates motion by making the character move from frame to frame.
There are several methods for generating the Avar values to obtain realistic motion. Traditionally, animators manipulate the Avars directly. Rather than set Avars for every frame, they usually set Avars at strategic points (frames) in time and let the computer interpolate or 'tween' between them in a process calledkeyframing. Keyframing puts control in the hands of the animator and has roots in hand-drawn traditional animation.
In contrast, a newer method called motion capture makes use of live action footage. When computer animation is driven by motion capture, a real performer acts out the scene as if they were the character to be animated. His/her motion is recorded to a computer using video cameras and markers and that performance is then applied to the animated character.
Each method has its advantages and as of 2007, games and films are using either or both of these methods in productions. Keyframe animation can produce motions that would be difficult or impossible to act out, while motion capture can reproduce the subtleties of a particular actor. For example, in the 2006 film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, actor Bill Nighy provided the performance for the character Davy Jones. Even though Nighy himself doesn't appear in the film, the movie benefited from his performance by recording the nuances of his body language, posture, facial expressions, etc. Thus motion capture is appropriate in situations where believable, the realistic behavior and action is required, but the types of characters required exceed what can be done throughout the conventional costuming.
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Computer animation, or CGI animation

08:45 0
Computer animation, or CGI animation, is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more general term computer-generated imagery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images while computer animation only refers to moving images.
Modern computer animation usually uses 3D computer graphics, although 2D computer graphics are still used for stylistic, low bandwidth, and faster real-time renderings. Sometimes, the target of the animation is the computer itself, but sometimes the target is another medium, such as film.
Computer animation is essentially a digital successor to the stop motion techniques used in traditional animation with 3D models and frame-by-frame animation of 2D illustrations. Computer-generated animations are more controllable than other more physically based processes, such as constructing miniatures for effects shots or hiring extras for crowd scenes, and because it allows the creation of images that would not be feasible using any other technology. It can also allow a single graphic artist to produce such content without the use of actors, expensive set pieces, or props.
To create the illusion of movement, an image is displayed on the computer monitor and repeatedly replaced by a new image that is similar to it, but advanced slightly in time (usually at a rate of 24 or 30 frames/second). This technique is identical to how the illusion of movement is achieved withtelevision and motion pictures.
For 3D animations, objects (models) are built on the computer monitor (modeled) and 3D figures are rigged with a virtual skeleton. For 2D figure animations, separate objects (illustrations) and separate transparent layers are used with or without a virtual skeleton. Then the limbs, eyes, mouth, clothes, etc. of the figure are moved by the animator onkey frames. The differences in appearance between key frames are automatically calculated by the computer in a process known as tweening or morphing. Finally, the animation is rendered.
For 3D animations, all frames must be rendered after the modeling is complete. For 2D vector animations, the rendering process is the key frame illustration process, while tweened frames are rendered as needed. For pre-recorded presentations, the rendered frames are transferred to a different format or medium, such as film or digital video. The frames may also be rendered in real time as they are presented to the end-user audience. Low bandwidth animations transmitted via the internet (e.g. 2D Flash, X3D) often use software on the end-users computer to render in real time as an alternative to streaming or pre-loaded high bandwidth animations.
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