Learning Goals
This course is about the fundamental ideas and algorithms of computer animation, with applications
in making games, films, simulations, etc. This is not an art class and we won't be learning to use any
particular animation package. The focus will be on the principles, representations,
algorithms, and overall tool-pipelines of animation.
After this course, students will be able to:
- use and manipulate common representations for animation data;
- customise or implement common kinematic and dynamic animation methods;
- describe recent advances by reading recent research papers;
- compare and constrast capture technologies for animation;
- view animation methods as providing various degrees of abstraction for authoring motions;
- view animation as an evolving interdisciplinary subject, spanning art and various areas of science
- describe and motivate the production pipeline for animation in games and film;
Topics
history of animation, perception, keyframes, splines, free-form deformations, orientation representations,
character skeletons, rigging and skinning, forward and inverse kinematics, motion capture,
motion clips, motion blending, move trees / motion graphs, procedural animation,
motion retargeting, facial animation, crowd animation, particle systems, rigid-body dynamics,
fluid simulation, cloth simulation, physics-based character animation, statistical models of pose and motion,
game production pipeline, visual effects production pipeline, game AI
Work
| Assignments | 40% |
| Participation | 10% |
| Quizzes | 20% |
| Final | 30% |
You are allocated three late days for the course to deal
with unforeseen circumstances. What you hand in should be
your own work, and any contributions of others should be acknowledged.
See the web page for further details and policies.
Textbook (optional)
Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques (third edition)
by Rick Parent, published by Morgan Kaufmann. UBC Bookstore: $82.05 new, $61.55 used |