1, Procedural Libraries for Cartoon Animation

A few years ago a PhD student, Jinhui Yu, proposed to provide animation libraries for things like fire, rain etc, as procedures. The effect was to provide infinitely variable forms of fire rain etc. Fire in particular is hard to do and the big studios like Disney employ specialists who just animate fire or whatever particular specialist effect. It turned out that most of these procedures had a similar structure so could be implemented by the same procedure interpreting a data structure.

The goal of this project is to reproduce Yu's work (he did lots of different effects and we only need one or two) with two big differences. The first is to develop a spreadsheet- like interface, which allows for images and numbers (procedure parameters) as an aid to refining procedures (= refining the data structure). The second is to develop a small language for specifying these procedures in the first place.

There are a number of other details which Yu didn't sort out, like how to manage the staging of his effects, but these can all be included in the language.
Implementation will be in Java using Java 2D.

References:

[Yu] "Stylised Procedural Animation" PhD Glasgow 1998
[Levoy&] "Spreadsheet for Images" SIGGRAPH 95
[Knudsen] "Java 2D Graphics" O'Reilly 1999

Resources: standard dept project kit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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