I thought I’d drop a quick note to tell everyone what sort of research I’ve been engaged in for the past year. The goal of one of the CGARP projects is to develop an animation filter to add a stop motion effect to character animations. In order to accomplish this, various students and I have been studying stop motion animation samples to see if we can put into words what we see. We decided to limit ourselves to walk cycle examples, specifically those recorded from a side view. From what we studied, we believe we’ve arrived at an initial description of how stop motion animation compares to CGI animation. It appears that stop motion animators, when moving from one target position to the next, initially either adjust a character’s orientation either too much or not enough. That is, as they approach a target position, they either have to back off or catch up. Currently, we’re playing with simple CGI animation software to see if we can adjust the interpolation between key-frames to approximate a stop motion effect. We have several possible candidates, but it will take some time to determine which approach looks the most promising.
Does this sound of interest to you? If so, please drop me note via the CONTACT button.
TTFN!
Dr. William Joel, Director