Thomas
Shen
So You Think Ants can Dance
Introduction
The animation is a method in which pictures are manipulated to appear as moving images. Today, most animations are made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Computer animation can be very detailed 3D animation, while 2D computer animation can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop motion technique to two and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets or clay figures. (Wikipedia: Animation)
Purpose
This project is used to a) understanding and practicing homogeneous coordinates transformation by using matrics; b) basic skeleton of character construction and c) visualizing data from the Carnegie Mellon motion capture database (http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/).
Design
The most important part of the project is the coordinates transformation. For animations in the real world, we are also trying to control the joint more precisely to make the animation more realistic. For the coordinate of each joint, its position in the world is based on the position of its parent coordinate in the world. Recursively calculating is a good way to handle the problem with careful calculations.