CS 395T - Computer Animation

Instructor: Okan Arikan

Class: TTh 2:00-3:30pm in RLM 7.112
E-mail: okan 'at' cs.utexas.edu
Office: ACES 2.110
Office hours: Tu/Th 4:00pm-5:00pm

!!! Important !!!

This is a preliminary web site. It will evolve throughout the semester. Please make sure you check it frequently.

The paper list is updated on 12/13/2006

Course description:

Computer animation is ubiquitous in computer games, movies and training simulations. A very important goal of generating an animation on a computer is making it believable. Even though we may not realize it, people are very picky observers of animation. For example, we can all tell when we see someone in a Godzilla suit on TV. What's interesting is that we may find a talking red car (in the new Pixar movie) more believable than the guy in a suit. In this course we will investigate how we can generate (or modify) believable animation through variety of methods (physically based simulation of reality, statistical synthesis, mathematical tricks etc.).

The goal of this class is to develop an understanding of the state of the art in computer animation research. Throughout the semester, we will read papers and analyze the ideas and the machinery that they use. Hopefully, you will be able to take some of these ideas and machinery and apply them in your own research.

Left:-Doom1 Right-Doom3. Is better graphics the only difference ?

Class format:

The class will be taught in a seminar-style format. Some classes (especially at the beginning) will be lectures presented by the instructors, but most classes will consist of students presenting one or two papers. After each paper, we will discuss the work and its relationship to other papers in animation and the current practices in the entertainment industry (games, movies).

Paper suggestions:

You can browse this (updated) list to pick a paper. You are not limited to this list; feel free to browse the papers that are presented in the leading computer graphics/animation conferences. You may want to take a look at recent papers in SIGGRAPH or Symposium on Computer Animation (google "siggraph 2006 papers" or "sca 2006 papers"). If you have trouble picking papers to present, come and talk to me.

Final Project Links:

Here are some of the topics we will cover:

Introductiory animation
Motion representation

Forward/Inverse kinematics
ODE's, constraints

Passive motion

Physically based simulation
Particles
Rigid bodies
Deformable objects
Liquid (water/gas) simulation
Simulating hair/fur
Fracture simulation

Active motion

Motion capture
Motion editing
Statistical/data driven methods
Physically based methods
Character rigging/skinning
Muscle deformations
Facial animation

Hybrid systems
And many more cool topics !!!

Schedule:

Week	Tuesday	Thursday
1		Introduction
2	Physically Based Simulation	Rigid Body Motion
3	Stable Fluids - Jos Stam	Visual Simulation of Smoke - Ronald Fedkiw, Jos Stam, Henrik Wann Jensen Presenter: Mark
4	A Multiresolution Framework for Dynamic Deformations - Steve Capell, Seth Green, Brian Curless, Tom Duchamp, Zoran Popovic Presenter: Uma	Finite Element Method overview Presenter: Mark Slides (ppt)
5	Animating Fracture - James O'Brien, Jessica Hodgins Animating Fracture (1999 paper) - James O'Brien, Jessica Hodgins Presenter: Matt	Dynamic Deformation of Solid Primitives with Constraints - Dimitri Metaxas, Demetri Terzopoulos Presenter: Albert
6	Character Animation Overview Presenter: Okan Reading: - Interactive Motion Generation from Examples - Motion Graphs	Motion Editing Presenter: Okan Reading: - Physically Based Motion Editing - Retargetting Motion to New Characters
7	Fracturing Rigid Materials Presenter: Matt	Large Steps in Cloth Simulation - Presenter: Uma
8	Physically Based Modeling and Animation of Fire - Presenter: Mark	Interpolating and Approximating Implicit Surfaces from Polygon Soup - Presenter: Albert Supplemental: Provably Good Moving Least Squares
9	Physically Based Animation - Case Studies Rigid body simulation Fluid simulation - Presenter: Okan	A Hybrid Particle Level set Method for Improved Interface Capturing - Doug Enright, Ronald Fedkiw, Joel Ferziger, Ian Mitchell - Presenter: Mark
10	Real-Time Simulation of deformation and Fracture of Stiff Materials - Matthias Muller, Leonard McMillan, Julie Dorsey, Robert Jagnow - Presenter: Matt	Rigid Fluids - Mark Carlson, Peter Mucha, Greg Turk - Presenter: Uma
11	Provably Good Moving Least Squares -Ravi Kolluri - Presenter: Albert	Animation capture (2 papers): - Capturing and Animating Skin Deformation in Human Motion - Spacetime Faces - Presenter: Okan
12	Interaction Capture and Synthesis - Paul Kry, Dinesh Pai - Presenter: Okan	Robust Treatment of Collisions, Contact and Friction for Cloth Animation - Presenter: Uma
13	Realistic Modeling of Bird Flight Animations - Presenter: Matt	Thanksgiving holiday
14	Evolving Virtual Creatures - Presenter: Mark	PaintShop 3D: An Interactive System for Point-Based Surface Editing -Presenter: Albert
15	Boids Continuum Crowds - Presenter: Matt, Mark	Project Presentations