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ECS 289H TOPICS IN CHARACTER ANIMATION (4) I

Lecture: 3 hours

Discussion: 1 hour

Prerequisite: Course 175 or 275 or 279

Grading: Letter, paper prsentations and homework (40%), project (60%)

Catalog Description:
Surveys current research on character animation tools, focusing on skeletal movement. Emphasis is placed on improving expressive aspects of movement and how physics, motion capture data, the arts and psychology literature, and interactive techniques can be used towards this goal.

Expanded Course Description:

  1. Looking at Animations
  2. Kinematic techniques
    1. Inverse Knematics
    2. Procedural techniques
    3. Review of hierarchies, joint representation, interpolation
  3. Physics and Control
    1. Spacetime constraints
    2. Controller based simulations
    3. Techniques for building controllers
    4. Muscle models
  4. Motion Capture Techniques
    1. Sequencing and blending clips
    2. Retargetting
  5. Movement Style
    1. Expressive aspects of movement
    2. Data-based approaches for expressive movement
    3. Procedural approaches for expressive movement
  6. Gesture Animation
    1. Nature of gesture
    2. Approaches to gesture animation
  7. Interactive Animation
  8. Skinning

Textbooks:
A selection of research papers

Computer Usage:
Computer usage in the projects is expected, although possibly purely mathematical or theoretical projects may be acceptable.

Project:
A project will be required. Projects will be devised by the students in consultation with the instructor. Projects which extend the students' existing research are encouraged.

Instructor: M. Neff

Prepared by: M. Neff (April 2007)

Overlap Statement:
Minor overlap with ECS 279 (Computer Animation) on the introductory material on kinematics.