Final Report

~.~.~THE MAYAN PROJECT~.~.~

My research this summer dealt mainly with animation. The goal for me was to learn about animation by working on a current project that aims at creating a virtual walk-through of an ancient Mayan temple. My research involved creating animations of people and placing them as entourage in the walk-through. As the weeks went by I was assigned a second second smaller project. I was to create the background scenery for the walkthrough.

To summarize my work I divided it up as follows:

• Poser: (Animation)

  A figure design and animation software. Throughout my project I worked mainly with this program and I used it to design and animate humans.
  
  Poser was my introduction to animation. By using it I learned about the general concepts of keyframing, timing and lighting in animation. I also learned about the typical challenges and difficulties that animators face. One such challange is creating a realistic human motion for a 3D object using certain control dials of rotation, bending and translation. This was very difficult because in order to design the motions, I had to position each body part in the different frames manually. There was no outline or guide as to how a motion can be created. Therefore I relied on my basic understanding of human motion. However, since I had no sense of timing or speed, the result was that my animations seemed "artificial".
  
  To solve this I used a method similar to that of Motion Capture. By using a digital video camera and recording live action then viewing the main frames of the movie, I was able to create a general outline of how the body needs to be positioned in the different frames. This technique helped tremendously with my keyframing.

  A second difficulty was with clothing and trying to find appropriate clothes for the animated people. I worked on deforming the clothing items available in Poser's default library to suit my characters. Cloth deformation was hard and posed a problem because since the geometry of the clothes did not match that of the Poser figures, I had to go through all the keyframes and "tweak" the clothes using the control dials mentioned above trying to make the clothes appear to be attached to the figures and have them move accordingly as the figures did. However, when the deformation did not produce the desired results, I then referred to the Internet and downloaded some Poser clothing.

• Maya: (Background)

  Maya's Paint Effects is a 2D and 3D paint program which I used to create the background for the walk-through. The goal is to paint texture files of trees, bushes, plants...etc., and these textures will then be put on polygons and used in a second application, World Tool Kit , along with my animations.
  
  Toward the end of the summer, the advisors were impressed with my work and the way I overcame the different obstacles, and so they asked me to come back during the Fall semester and continue the internship. So, my project during the Fall will be to continue working with the texture files and to finalize the animations.

Part of my research experience during this summer involved reading a number of research papers that relate to issues I have encountered during the research. I read a total of five papers, and I presented four of them to the Alpha One research group here at the University.

• "TicTacToon: A Paperless System for Professional 2D Animation" (PDF Format)
• " Retargeting Motion to New Characters" (PDF Format)
• "Animation From Observation: Motion Capture and Motion Editing" (Look under Papers)
• "Animating Human Athletes"
• "Texture Mapping for Cel Animation"