Assignment 4: Final Project
Due Dates:
Mar 27: Proposal document due
Apr 10,12: In-class presentation of project
May 1,3: Final
report and presentations
Grade Value: 30%
Overview:
In this assignment, you will do a project of your choice. As a rough
guideline, the project should be related to some aspect of technical
animation such as the topics we have discussed in class, or animation
related topics that have appeared in SIGGRAPH or the SCA conference.
Try to keep it relatively small in scope, however, similar in workload
to the first three projects. Some ideas are listed at the end of this
web page. In most cases, this will be a programming project, but in a
few cases it may be more appropriate to create a written report, for
example if you are investigating some aspect of human motion or if you
are interested in how people perceive animations. For any topic,
please clear it with me through a meeting, discussion, or email BEFORE
you begin to write your proposal.
Proposal
Your proposal should be a written document of approximately 2-5 pages,
and should contain the following sections.
- Problem statement / goals. What is the overall idea of the
project? What do you want to achieve? Why is
it interesting?
- Approach. What will your system do? What are the inputs and
outputs? How will each part of the system work?
You may want to start with a system block
diagram and then have short sections
describing each piece of the system.
- Resources. What resources are already available to you? Will you
use some motion capture data or off-the-shelf
models? Will you use some code from the web?
What will you have to create or write
yourself?
- Demos. How will you show off your system?
- Timeline. Break down the steps for completing your project and
give approximate times. What will you be able
to show along the way? Please plan for early
demos that can show partial progress in case
you get stuck at some point in the project.
Final Project Report
Your final report can be an updated version of the proposal. I would
expect a document of approximately 4-10 pages.
You should:
- Correct and expand the technical
section of the proposal and describe the
algorithms you actually used in your
project.
- Present some results (plots, tables, screen shots, images, videos...).
- Describe pros and cons of the system.
- Tell me what else you would do or what you would do differently if
you had time.
Final Project Ideas
- Extend one of the regular class projects to create effects that you didn't have time for the first time around.
- Scale down any SIGGRAPH paper or Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) paper that has to do with animation. Tim Rowley's page has pointers to most papers from recent conferences. (Notice that the pointers to SCA papers are maintained by Ke-Sen Huang and are linked in somewhere toward the bottom of Tim's web page.)
- Explore Kim, Kim, and Shin's schemes for smooth quaternion interpolation (get the paper)
- Implement a scaled down version of Igarashi's spatial keyframing paper for interactive animation based on keyframed character poses.
- Other sketch-based interfaces for controlling animation: Maybe you just want to interactively re-time the motion -- see Terra and Metoyer's SCA 2004 paper on the "Research/Performance Timing" section off of this page. Or create a gesture-based interface for sketching motion -- see Thorne, Burke, and van de Panne's Motion Doodles project.
- You can create interactive animations of more general drawings as well! Check out the technique in Ngo et al's SIGGRAPH 2000 paper and see this class project for some ideas.
- If you want more realistic character physics, take a look at the ski stunt simulator. For a little more information check out the papers on the "Ski Stunt Simulator" and "Interactive Control for Physically-based Animation" on Michiel van de Panne's publications web page.
- Create animations from sine waves plus noise? See this Perlin paper on the Improv system.
- Implement a version of one of the motion blending or style papers discussed in class.
- You might find the ODE simulation engine or this code base useful for physics-based animation projects.
- Dig into L-systems and figure out how to animate realistic plant development.
- Write a simple fluid simulator based on this Foster and Metaxas paper on fluids or extend the simulator provided in this Stam paper on fluid dynamics for games
- More to come as we continue through the course....