Final Project
Due Dates:
03/13, 03/15, in class: Final Project Pitches
03/29: Written Proposal Submission
04/19: Final Project Checkpoint
05/8 (final exam slot): Project and Report Submission
Grade Value: 40%
Overview:
In this assignment, you can work individually or in a group of 2-3 to implement a project you are interested in. This project should be related to some aspect of technical animation. You can choose from the topics covered in our class, or you can find other animation related topics which have appeared in SIGGRAPH or the SCA conference. We discussed some examples of final projects in class on March 1st and additional ideas are given at the end of this handout, but really, you should let this project be driven by your own interests!
Deadlines:
- 03/13,03/15: Every group will pitch to the class one or more potential projects for discussion and feedback.
- 03/29: Written proposal submission DUE.
- 04/19: Every group should schedule an appointment with me to give an update on final project progress. You are expected to show some initial results (e.g., a very simplified example) at that time.
- 05/8: Final report and animations due. Final project presentations.
Submission Guidelines:
All submissions should be emailed to me at nsp at cs.cmu.edu. You should submit your written documents, slides and project according to the corresponding deadlines.
Proposal Your proposal should be a written document of approximately 2-3 pages, and should contain the following sections:
- Problem statement / goals: What is the overall idea of the project? What do you hope 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 include short sections describing each piece of the system.
- Resources: What resources are already available to you? Will you use motion capture data or off-the-shelf models? Will you use code from the web? What must you 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 Report:
- Your final report can be an updated version of the proposal. It should be a document of approximately 4-10 pages.
- You should correct and expand the technical section of the proposal and describe the algorithms you actually use in your project.
- Present some results (plots, tables, screen shots, images, videos...)
- Describe pros and cons of the system.
- State the problems you encountered and how you solved them.
- Tell us what else you would do or what would you do differently if you had time.
Final Presentation:
- In addition to your final report document, you will prepare a final presentation.
- This presentation will be given in front of the class during the final exam period.
- There will not be a lot of time (expect 10 minutes). However, you should aim to present a good summary of the content of your final report within that 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. You can access the papers from the ACM digital library.
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: 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.
You might find one of the many existing simulation engines useful for physics-based animation projects.
Dig into L-systems and figure out how to animate realistic plant development.
Write a fluid simulator using one of the techniques discussed in class or extend the simulator provided in this Stam paper on fluid dynamics for games
Simulate water by scaling down Enright et al's Animation and Rendering of Complex Water Surfaces paper.
Implement deformable body simulation based on Irving et al's Invertible Finite Elements For Robust Simulation of Large Deformation paper.
Simulate flocks using the Boids model.
Experiment with, analyze, and/or extend this adaptive cloth simulator.
These days many papers come with code -- choose a paper you find really interesting that provides a codebase. Can you use that code for your own creative purposes? (I will only approve these projects after you show you can run, use, and modify the code in some useful way :)