CS777
Spring 2003

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maya

All readings are somewhere in the "Reader" directory tree. Usually organized by the author's name.

Week 2

Required Readings:

Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation. John Lasseter. SIGGRAPH 87.

A System for Computer Generated Movies. Ed Catmull. Proceedings of the 1972 ACM Annual Conference.

Interactive Skeleton Techniques for Enhancing Motion Dynamics in Key Frame Animation. N. Burtnyk and Marceli Wein. CACM, October 1976.

Optional Readings:

This paper is an interesting exploration of what can be done with clever parameterizations. It is good food for thought.

Accessible Animation and Customizable Graphics via Simplicial Configuration Modeling. Tom Ngo, Doug Cutrell, Jenny Dana, Bruce Donald, Lorie Loeb and Shunhui Zhu. SIGGRAPH '00.

Week 3

Rotations:

The readings for this week center on the issues of representing rotations. Unfortunately, there are no really great sources. Two required readings are:

Practical Parameterization of Rotations Using the Exponential Map. F. Sebastian Grassia Journal of Graphics Tools, 1998

I like this paper because it gives a good insight into the issues, and the tradeoffs between representations. It glosses over a lot of the details of the exponential map, but they aren't so critical.

Animating Rotations With Quaternion Curves Ken Shoemake SIGGRAPH '85.

This is one of a large number of things on quaternions. Its not necessarily the best, but it was the first to introduce quaternions to the graphics community. Be careful: the original version had some typos.

I am hoping to write a tutorial on rotations, but I am not sure I will get it done in time for class.

Kinematics and Inverse Kinematics:

Dealing with the ill-conditioned equations of motion for articulated figures
Anthony Maciejewski. Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE , Volume: 10 Issue: 3 , May 1990

This paper is useful since it explains why IK is hard, no matter how you solve it.

Real-Time Inverse Kinematics Techniques for Anthropomorphic Limbs. Deepak Tolani, Ambarish Goswami, and Norman Badler. Graphical Models. 2000.

For this paper, I only require you to read throught Section 2. (including all of Section 2). The methods the paper introduces aren't crucual, but its a nice survey of the problem and the previous solution. The rest of the paper is optional. I think that our footskate paper is an easier and more complete solution.

Optional Readings

Quaternions. Ken Shoemake.

This is a set of notes written by Ken on Quaternions. It covers a few extra details, and spells out some of the equations more clearly.

Rotating Objects Using Quaternions. Nick Bobick. Game Developer Magazine, February 1998.

This is a very practical article about what quaternions do and why they are useful.

General Construction of Time-Domain Filters for Orientation Data. Jehee Lee and Sung Yong Shin. IEEE TVCG April 2002.

This paper is a little bit harder to read. However, it does show what exponential maps are useful for (in a more theoretical way), and brings home some of the issues in rotation representations.

Lucas Kovar John Schreiner Michael Gleicher. Footskate Cleanup for Motion Capture Editing. Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA). July 2002.

A thorough investigation of how to make simple IK really work well.

Week 4

Computer Animation of Human Walking: a Survey. Multon, Fance, Cani-Gascuel, and Debunne. Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, 1999

This is a very broad brush survey. Not a lot of details, but it can give you ideas of what people have tried over the years.

Real-time Responsive Animation with Personality. Ken Perlin. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 1994.

How to make human motion as a hack.

Optional Readings

Look for other Ken Perlin stuff on the web. Particularly his Java demos and his 1997 "Improv" paper.

Week 5

Monday:
Animation from Observation. Draft of Chapter 1 from an Unwritten Book. Michael Gleicher

This is a rambling document about why motion capture is hard. No promises that its great literature, but at least it exists.

An optional reading (a condensed version of the above) is: Michael Gleicher. Animation from Observation: Motion Capture and Modtion Editing. Computer Graphics. 33(4), 51-55. November, 1999.

Wednesday:
:Hyun Joon Shin, Jehee Lee, Michael Gleicher, and Sung Yong Shin. Computer Puppetry: An Importance-Based Approach. ACM Transactions of Graphics. April 2001.

A survey of the issues (including solutions) for many of the issues that arise in online motion capture.

Friday:
Techniques for Motion Editing. An even older chapter of a book that will never be written. Michael Gleicher.

An overview of what motion editing is about, as well as some discussion of some of the basic methods. Needs to be updated and revised, but I have little incentive to do it since the book will probably never happen. Oh well.

Optional Readings

Parts of Alberto Menache's book on Motion Capture. (sorry no online version).

You might want to look at some of the original sources for the motion editing methods described in my chapter. For example, Motion Warping was introduced by Witkin and Popovic in 1995. Many other techniques come from a 1995 paper by Bruderlin and Williams called "Motion Signal Processing."

If you didn't read the footskate paper (above), now might be a good time.

There's also a paper by me called "Motion Path Editing" that you will encounter soon enough...

Week 6

Monday:

No reading (video day). Use this as a chance to get ahead in the readings. There's a lot for Wednesday and Friday.

Wednesday:

Verbs and Adverbs. Rose, Bodenheimer, Cohen.

Motion Graphs. Kovar, Gleicher and Pighin.

Friday:

If you still haven't read it, look at the footskate paper.

You should also read the Retargeting paper.

Week 7

Monday:
We'll finally get to the footskate and retargeting papers.

Wednesday:
A Simple Motion Processor (chapter from the unwritten book).

Friday:
TBD

Week 8

No Class

Week 9

Spring Break

Week 10

We'll spend this week to talk about cinematography and the "Film Arts." To prepare for this, I will ask you to read a book (look here for suggestions) on Film and to read the paper:

Movies in the Minds Eye. Hochberg and Brooks. from Post-Theory, edited by Boardwell and Carroll.

Week 11

Monday:
TBD

Wednesday:
J.P. Lewis, Matt Cordner, Nickson Fong. Pose Space Deformation: A Unified Approach to Shape Interpolation and Skeleton-Driven Deformation. SIGGRAPH 2000.

Alex Mohr and Michael Gleicher. Building Efficient, Accurate Character Skins from Examples. To Appear in SIGGRAPH 2003.

optional:
Alex Mohr, Luke Tokheim, and Michael Gleicher. Direct Manipulation of Interactive Character Skins. 2003 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics.

Week 12

Monday:
No readings - it will be video/discussion day.

Wednesday:
Andy Witkin and David Baraff. SIGGRAPH Physics Notes: Differential Equation Basics, Particle System Dynamics, Implicit Methods. (note: these are pages 7-31 in the notes).

Friday:
David Baraff and Andy Witkin. Large Steps in Cloth Simulation. SIGGRAPH 1998.

Week 13

Monday:
No readings - it will be project review day.

Wednesday:
Andy Witkin and David Baraff. SIGGRAPH Physics Notes: Constrained Dynamics.

Friday:
Chapters 3 and 4 of my thesis.

Optional:
Gavin Miller. The Motion Dynamics of Snakes and Worms. SIGGRAPH 1988.

Coming Soon

Friday:
Tony DeRose, Michael Kass, and Tien Truong. Subdivision surfaces in character animation (link is to ACM digital Library). SIGGRAPH 1998.