Lab2 Parametric Keyframing of Articulated Figures

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To Do: Learn to animate an articulated figure using parametric keyframing to control the movement of each joint (DOF). The suggested walking model consists of 7 segments linked by 6 joints, a simplified model of human lower body.

What this means:

  1. First you have to decide what character you want to animate and  how you want to make this character move in space.

  2. Create a model of character, it can be very simple or complex.

  3. Depending on the motion you have in mind, find out keyframes in the motion. Finding keyframes is not simple and typically few keyframes are chosen in the beginning. For example suppose we want to a animate bouncing ball. In this case we can begin with 3 keyframes, one on each extremes and one in the middle (when ball touched floor). Then we can play this animation and interactively add, remove or modify existing keyframes.

  4. Once keyframes have to finalized, setup character at each key frame. Setting up character means specifying position of each joint.

  5. When you play animation, each joint's position from all keyframes will be interpolated to generate in-between frames.

  6. Now add new keyframes, remove or modify existing keyframes to get desired animation. Also you can visualize interpolated curves for each joint and can edit it directly.

Suggestions:

1. Start with simple model.

2. Until you get desired motion from the character you build, forget about realism and nice images. An expressive motion with non-realistic rendering is much better then bad motion with photo-realistic rendering (remember cartoons).

Deliverables:

render animation in MPEG format (the suggested format because of its compact size) and mail it to cs4247@comp.nus.edu.sg

 

Lab2: Parametric

           Keyframing

Deadline: 6th March

   

Lab1: Raytracing

Deadline: 21st Feb

 

 

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