3D animation

One aspect of a growing VR industry that developers have to face is the ethics behind the technology. This includes making sure that technology is readily available and accessible to as large of a population as possible. Current consumer virtual reality (VR) headsets typically utilize two controllers to navigate a virtual environment, leading to accessibility issues for potential users that cannot effectively operate a controller. We propose NaVRgate, a proof of concept idea that removes the need for controllers in which a user uses expressions to navigate a virtual environment. The system utilizes the computer webcam and computer vision face and eye position tracking to capture the nature of expression tracking, with certain positional thresholds representing different facial expressions. To test this system, We design a game environment where a user navigates with either a controller or the face position tracker, collecting a set of orbs scattered around the map as quickly as they can, comparing the efficiency between navigation through the novel computer vision and traditional controller methods. Users are also questioned on the difficulty of use and experience with each control input method. This paper details the process of the development and drafts, to the statistical experiment constructed to determine the efficiency of head gestures.

For graduates of creative industries programs of learning to be successful when they enter the workforce for the first time, a number of skills, attributes, knowledge, and understandings are required, as described in the Empirically Grounded Curriculum Development Framework for 3D Animation & Modelling Programmes (Hansen, 2020). This short paper explores one of three core pillars in the Empirical Framework, developing an optimal approach to teaching and learning.

Ordering 3D configurations of curves of increasing complexity
Configurations of curves in 3D of increasing complexity
Configurations in 3D:
-- single continuous curves (Group I)
-- interlocking disjoint curves (Group II)
-- animations offering a 3D perspective (Group III)
-- fractional rotation of continuous curves with indication of increased spread (Group IV)
-- animation of curves with indication of increased spread (Group V)
-- animations of toroidal curves with indication of increased spread (Group VI)
Interpretation of knot language?
Psychosocial implications of configurations of curves?
Static description of cycles versus the dynamics of Cyclic experience
Implicit coherence speculatively explored?
Relative interestingness and boringness of forms of coherence
Sustainable dynamics "re-cognized" as knots?
Articulation and complexification of cycles of sustainability
Musical comprehension of unity versus diversity using four geometric parameters?
Imagined potential of circular forms as a pattern language

The gesture is one of the most natural and expressive methods for the hearing impaired. Most researchers, however, focus on either static gestures, postures or a small group of dynamic gestures due to the complexity of dynamic gestures. We propose the Kinect Translation Tool to recognize the user's gesture. As a result, the Kinect Translation Tool can be used for bilateral communication with the deaf community. Since real-time detection of a large number of dynamic gestures is taken into account, some efficient algorithms and models are required. The dynamic time warping algorithm is used here to detect and translate the gesture. Kinect Sign Language should translate sign language into written and spoken words. Conversely, people can reply directly with their spoken word, which is converted into literal text together with the animated 3D sign language gestures. The user study, which included several prototypes of the user interface, was carried out with the observation of ten participants who had to gesture and spell the phrases in American Sign Language (ASL). The speech recognition tests for simple phrases have therefore shown good results. The system also recognized the participant's gesture very well during the test. The study suggested that a natural user interface with Microsoft Kinect could be interpreted as a sign language translator for the hearing impaired.

In her article Carolin Scheler addresses the question of the origin of the predominantly uniform image order of commercial computer animated films. She starts from the assumption that the visual worlds can only be deciphered with an understanding of their process of creation. Although the technology behind the films does not prescribe a cinematic narrative nor a visual code, a production-aesthetic approach can be used to identify a kinship between the computer images and various manifestations of a visual culture anchored in the United States. Scheler exemplifies this relationship in this article by means of 19th-century American landscape painting.

Bodies - photoshopped, facetuned, beautified, deepfaked, synthesized simulated, rendered, digitized. What do these impalpable figures on the surface of the screen want from our palpable fingers holding it?  Do they want something? Puzzled by the idea that images might want something (as suggested by WJT Mitchell, 2005) I started exploring possible modes of relating to digital images through a performative frame. This became ‘Digital Golem, Gesticulating Hybrids, Affective Clones and Whatever They Want’, a body of artistic processes that took shape back in 2018, during my studies in New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In the three years since, the digital landscape has undergone an accelerated transformation. Posing as influencers advertising fast fashion brands DAZ3D digital avatars have taken over Instagram. Meanwhile, everyone and their grandmother has turned into a 2D video by #distantdancing on TikTok inbetween ZOOM calls. Presented here is a text which served as a companion peace to 'a performing site for affective clones & whatever they want'.  Wanting to invert the (dominant) Gestalt of the animated figure, a specific type of digital image, the text maps the processes of imagemaking, animation, choreography and somatics.

In 1996, DreamWorks animation began the production of the first 3D-animated feature film that introduces human characters. DreamWorks Animation employed a costume designer, Isis Mussenden, to be part of the film production; at the same time, she became the first and one of the rare costume designers who have been employed and credited in 3D-animated feature films. DreamWorks Animation aimed at a different direction in characters’ clothing than what Pixar, another animation company, had introduced before in 3D-animation Toy Story (1995), in which a doll moved in her solid bell dress with no flow and movement of the fabric. This paper discusses Isis Mussenden’s costume design process for animated characters in 3D-animated feature film Shrek (2001) by DreamWorks, and is part of an ongoing research project for a doctoral dissertation at Aalto University, Finland, titled: Costume Design, Process and Digitalization in 3D-animated Feature Films.

Three semi-structured interviews with Isis Mussenden have been conducted in Los Angeles in 2016 and several others are planned for the next two years. The data analysis reveals various aspects which influenced her design choices for the character’s costumes, which are not common when designing for live action feature films. Her design process was greatly affected by the lack of advanced technology, which created restricted parameters to design with. Additionally, an animated film itself as a medium affects costume design choices. Mussenden shows her active role in an intensive collaboration with artists from different disciplines at the DreamWorks animation studio. She also brought her knowledge to the production by instructing animators and character designers to understand the cut, material and silhouette for the animated costumes. As Shrek was an entirely computer animated film, Mussenden’s costume design process had a different approach as there were no actors involved: the actors’ physical input was missing and the character’s body shapes varied from other filmmaking processes. Nevertheless, her research process remained the same as before.

The results of this paper will benefit both fields, animation and costume design. This paper will bring together and analyse the creative space of costume design and animation. It brings forth an awareness and new knowledge about the costume design process in 3D-animated feature films and about the costume designer’s contribution as part of the films design and production process.

VR has brought with it new possibilities in storytelling, alternative approaches to building narrative structures, and unique ways of creating immersive experiences. Meanwhile, a relatively new possibility which has become available thanks to Virtual Reality technology is the application of VR in digital painting, illustration, 3D modeling, and animation. Recently introduced VR-modeling applications such as Oculus Medium and MasterpieceVR provide 3D artists with the possibility to create 3D models directly inside the virtual space through an intuitive spatial interface. In addition, with Virtual Reality, digital Painting on 2D canvases is now extended to 3D spaces. VR applications such as Google Tilt Brush allow artists and digital painters to unleash their spatial imagination and draw in 3D space. In a similar fashion, Quill and AnimVR are virtual reality applications that allow artists to create 3D animations without the need to deal with the usual technical processes of 3D computer graphics. This article argues and demonstrates that these recent developments are giving rise to new visual aesthetics, creating unprecedented aesthetic possibilities for artists and animators. Focusing particularly on Quill and AnimVR, the article discusses that these two relatively new VR applications are re-defining the aesthetics of 3D animation by bringing 2D aesthetics to 3D computer graphics. With reference to three recently produced animated short films ― Dear Angelica (Saschka Unseld, 2017), Beyond the Fence (Goro Fujita, 2018), and Wired (Zeyu Ren, 2019) ― this article explores different ways VR technology and applications such as Quill and AnimVR are influencing animation workflows and production pipelines. It further explores how these new workflows and pipelines are giving birth to new and unprecedented aesthetics. The article concludes by identifying some aesthetic commonalities that can be observed across the animations created by using these emerging VR technologies.

A criação de personagens virtuais para cinema de animação implica com frequência a necessidade de adaptação gráfica das personagens de forma a dotá-las de maior expressividade ou de maior capacidade de criar empatia no espetador. Consoante o conceito do projeto e consoante a estória e a visão do autor que a conta, essas adaptações passam por vezes pela antropomorfização das personagens, ou seja, pela adaptação das personagens para que se assemelhem a seres humanos. O processo de antropomorfização de uma personagem passa, antes da construção da própria, pela seleção dos elementos humanos a incluir nesse processo. Dependendo do projeto, podem ser aplicadas diferentes abordagens à antropomorfização das personagens. As conclusões a retirar deste projeto serão posteriormente aplicadas na criação das personagens da série Too Snail to Talk em desenvolvimento pelos autores.

Animation theorist Vivian Sobchack expresses her predilection for animated films that “visibly labor”, and describes 3D animations as “effortless” in appearance [1]. While many theorists may lack the practical experience of creating animation, essential knowledge of the nature of labour in 3D animation is gained through first-hand practice alone. Without this knowledge, much creative work in 3D animation is misconstrued as mere automation. Using my experience as an animator, actor, and educator, I engage in a self-reflective analysis to interrogate how evidence of an animator’s individual contributions can be detected in 3D animation. I employ the metaphor of “the artist’s/animator’s hand” as a means to understand the nature of this involvement. I establish a set of parameters for non-practitioners to employ when trying to locate the contributions of individual animators within 3D animation. With these tools, animation theorists will have a practice-informed lens by which to better understand the act of animating through 3D software, as well as strategies for locating individual animators’ contribution in 3D animation.

The first product in the award-winning History Adventures, World of Characters series

Now available for download around the world on Apple Books, as well as Chromebooks, iOS, Android, and Kindle Interactive.

Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/history-adventures-world-of-characters/id1557927535
Chromebooks: https://revolutions.historyadventures.app/
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/history-adventures/id1543923847
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spencerstriker.history_adventures
Kindle Interactive: https://www.amazon.com/History-Adventures-World-Characters-Industrialization-ebook/dp/B08YXN4W29

Journey Through our Digital Book

In your journey through this digital book you are going to discover the lives of  five individuals who had to work out where they stood into this modern world.

In late 18th Century America, one unnamed slave turned spy, Agent 355, decided to risk everything for the cause of revolution and the principle of freedom.

On the other side of the world in Australia, Jiemba of the Eora Nation, decided to fight for his traditions against British invaders intent of colonizing his ancestral homeland and trampling on his beliefs.

Half a century later, a Chinese trader, Fei Hong fought a different battle. Hong decided to smuggle British opium from India to China and lost everything as he went from smuggler, to trafficker and finally addict before being caught. 

In 1890s Africa, Khari decided to oppose European trade and fight back against the Belgian exploitation of his ancient tribal lands along on the Congo River. The Belgian’s murderous regime had mercilessly extracted  rubber using local labour and Khari refused to let his tribe suffer any more. Resistance was the only choice.

150 years after Agent 355, a social reformer called Thomas Brown decided to disguise himself as a janitor and expose the truth about the infamous Chicago meat packing district. He uncovered a world of filth, corruption and reckless disdain for human life that led him to question what the future would bring.

Just like everyone in this History Adventures (world of characters) YOU will have to decide whether the unparalleled technological and economic advancements of the period from 1750-1900 was worth the human cost. Ultimately, the experiences of Agent 355, Jiemba, Fei Hong, Khari and Thomas Brown challenge you to think “what would I have done?” And, this is the best question about the past you can ever ask…

History Adventures presents a fresh approach to history education, designed for today’s digital generation.

Created by Spencer Striker, PhD

While an actor's performance in a stage play may be seen as a continuous and unmediated form of acting, an actor's performance in a film is constructed through shot framing, editing, effects work, and other cinematic apparatuses. With the advent of digital filmmaking, constructed performances have become more complex and nuanced, especially through the use of motion capture. This research explores how we frame acting within a motion capture context-and specifically, how this affects our larger understanding of what is acting and how acting can be constructed. What does acting become when the product of acting starts as data and finishes as computer-generated images that may only tangentially resemble the actor's "original" performance? Is the source actor solely responsible for the performance we see on screen, or should other people within the production pipeline receive credit for their creative contributions to the finished acting result? How do we understand the act of acting in motion capture? Through consolidating and linking theoretical and practical considerations of acting in motion capture, this paper proposes a number of ways to conceive of acting and presence within a virtual acting context.

Any animation student can tell you the right way to produce an animated short. Books like The Animator's Workbook (White), Animation from Concept to Production (Rall), and others spell out the process from storyboarding to final render. Following this template will get you to final production, but this process is meant for a big studio or large team, not for an independent or student animator. Additionally, these books focus heavily on the technical side of animation emphasizing production. Students learning to be animators need to learn both story and production if they are going to make animated films. The focus of this paper is to find ways to help students produce better-animated films. This is achieved by focusing on storytelling and by defining a process for students that better suits the timelines and compromises they make to complete a film. Looking through the lens of independent animation production and my last animated film Sheltering Sky (2019) we discover new processes for creating a story and how the processes of the giant studios can be reworked for students and independent artists and teams.

A Multimedia Thesis Project Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of MULTIM3 Submitted to the School of Design and Arts – Multimedia Arts. This paper is a documentation for a 3D animation fiction featuring 3D animated graphics in the realm of a future Philippines with an established space forces that defended the planet against invasion of aliens.

The planet Athalon has been destroyed by 20 years of continuous civil war among its inhabitants. One tribe, the tribe of Athalanosus was able to escape. As their planet was completely destroyed, they need to survive and find another planet that sustains life. They plan to conquer the Planet Earth to be their new planet. The Philippine Space Forces will be there to protect the Earth.

Virtual Reality (VR) is creation of virtual environment that can be experienced  as if it is really there. The creation of  a DIT 3D Virtual Reality Tour Guide, by modeling an environment of 3D digital images and through the game engine environment, user will be a ble to tour through virtually online and offline.
3D virtual environments offer sufficient assistance to (especially novice) users in navigating the virtual environment, find objects/places of interests, and easy commands to interact with them. This project proposes the adoption of guided tours of virtual environments as an effective user aid and describes a novel tool that provides automatic code generation for adding such guided tours to 3D virtual environments.

The results from the Multiple Approaches to Game Analysis Workshop 2018 hosted by the University of Lincoln. As animator, I came up with a framework to analyze animation in games to uncover deeper narratives. The game that we were given to analyze, Fortnite, presented pretty straightforward animations but still presented a few challenges that didn't fit into the framework.

This thesis comprehends the appeal in motion capture animation. The problem in this study is that many books deal only with the definition of the appeal from the perspective of conventional animation, therefore, a phenomenological study was conducted. There are eight participants who are involved in this study to obtain the data. The study objectives are to study the problem of 'uncanny valley' in the movement of motion capture animation, examine the success of using the markerless technique in animation production and investigate the benefit of using motion capture in animation. The finding from this study are that motion capture do not have its appeal included in the animation because of the phenomenon of 'uncanny valley' that contributes to the animated character to be moving in the inappropriate way with regard to its visual design. Besides, the use of markerless technique, in general, does make the character moves accordingly to the human actor but remains inaccurate. Additionally, staging is one of the animation principles that has become the theme of the benefit in using motion capture. It helps in providing flexibility to form a desired look of cinematography. Nevertheless, the researcher hopes that more digital animating techniques can be produced like the animating technique using the simulation of marionette upon the animation character in order to have more perspective in studying the appeal in animation.

The final year project can be viewed via this link: https://youtu.be/31bP2uR7ilw

Animators are often expected to film their own acting reference. However, most animators are not trained actors, and as a result, their performances lack depth when dealing with emotionally-rich subject matter. The result is superficial acting in both reference and final animation. This superficial acting is essentially a caricature of an emotion, rather than the emotion itself, and has been used to create 'many believable characters with individual personalities'. However, while superficial acting may suffice for some caricatured performances, this paper explores how emotionally-driven and authentic acting reference provides benefits to all types of animated performance. I propose a methodology for achieving emotionally-driven acting reference, based on my experience as an actor and animator. I also compare and contrast superficial animated performances with emotionally-driven animated performances. This research extends the possibilities for greater acting possibilities within animation, including a greater emotional range of animated characters and more emotionally-rich subject matter.

What is 3D graphics? How is it used in the arts, work and entertainment environments? This book does an all round analysis of 3D graphics, providing an historical overview from its inception till today including its usage in video games, animated movies, VFX, advertisement and much more, and examining the pipeline and the software used in the creation of computer graphics contents. To support the research, several interviews to Italian professionals of the field are included, with the aim of summing up the current situation of the Italian market and to provide an introductory guide to whom wants to start a career in this field.

Stop-motion is a technique as old as cinema itself, and objectual nature, while the other animation techniques are purely imagetical. Always dependent history of this hybridization of knowledge is presented here under the concept of spatiotemporal resolvability. It is a proposal of parametrization of analysis of the techniques and respective technologies in its capacity to modulate the formal dynamism of the structures and materials for the frame-by-frame animation. The neologism presented here concerns both the original meaning of the term and the ability of a process to resolve demands satisfactorily, but it also approaches the meaning of the term resolution-borrowed from of the realization of space along the time. in the sense that the technique refers to its artistic purpose, using technologies and materials that in the case of stop-motion were not designed for this art form. However, this constant and historical lack of seems to constitute the technical inventiveness that characterizes it. The spatiotemporal resolvability characterizes how these adaptations have been given up to the present, and beckons us to be living a privileged moment for the puppet animation due to the conditions that converged on it.

Computer graphics and animation has become a key technology in determining future research and development activities in many academic and industrial branches. The aim of this journal is to be an international peer-reviewed open access forum for scientific and technical presentations and discus the latest advances in Computer graphics and animation.

Computer Graphics or Computer Generated Imagery or CGI is a sub-field of Computer Science. CGI produces fascinating and jaw dropping results. At times CGI diminishes the thin line between reality and vitality , as it gets difficult to identify the original from CGI. The jaw dropping effects however require a lot of efforts and follow a strict process and procedure. This paper tries to broadly explain the process and procedure commonly known as pipeline of CGI.

The industry of real estate is rapidly growing and its competition rises every year. This occurrence adds pressure to real estate agents and causes confusion to regular people
who want to buy a property of their own. Of all the aggressive, persuasive, and competitive real estate companies out there,
the proponents have chosen the Victoria Sports Tower Station II condominium of New San José Builders Inc. which approved to carry out the proposed system, Project G.O.D. The proposed system is not only designed to help real estate agents to gain a
competitive advantage in real estate sales and marketing. But also, it helps buyers to experience the ease of choosing a property without the hassle of going to the real
showroom if they lack the time opportunity. The proponents hoped for other companies to embrace and implement the
proposed system to gain recognition and make a mark in real estate marketing.

This is 12 months course in which you will learn about modeling, texturing, lighting, rigging, rendering and character animation. After successful completion of this course you can go for Digital Artist, Animator- Rigging Artist, Light & Camera Artist, Compositor, Digital Effects Animator, Modeller, Pre-Visualization Artist, Visual Effects Supervisor etc.

Version Control System (VCS) techniques for managing the creation of 3D computer generated models exist for static 3D models, however, there are no solutions for revision control of the animation data from animated 3D models. A precondition for any type of VCS is the ability to compare two versions of an item, to identify the differences between them and to combine these. To this end, we propose a novel 3-way difference, merging and conflict resolution technique for 3D animation data.