Last modified: 17:30 Mar 26, 2000
Readings for Computer Animation
To find out what you're supposed to read, please check the
syllabus.
The papers listed here are generally ones that are either
recommended for the class, or for animation students in general.
Also see the books page, or last year's
course web.
There will be several readers for the class. All will be available
at the DOIT tech store.
- The first 5 chapters of a pre-print of Rick Parent's animation
Text. (available the first week of class)
- A set of papers on mathematical
foundations, rotations, and basic physical simulation.
- Another set of papers on simulation
and motion.
References on the Art of Animation
- Lasseter, J. Principles of
Traditional Animation Applied to Computer Animation. Proceedings
SIGGRAPH '87.REQUIRED
SEMINAL
- This is the reference for what animation means in computer
science. Much of this is the same material in the intro chapter of
"The Illusion of Life," but simply making the graphics world aware
of that material was a major achievement.
There is an on-line
summary of this paper, but the paper is so important that you
should read it.
- Lasseter, J. Tricks to Animating
Characters with a Computer. SIGGRAPH '94 Course Notes "Animation
Tricks".
- This is more of the same thoughts on how to make animation
from a person who not only is a master, but had learned from the
master. It is online.
- Thomas,
F. and Johnson, O., The
Illusion of Life, Abbeville Press, 1981. Chapter 3:
Principles of
Animation.SEMINAL
- This chapter is the reference for the "Disney Animated Style."
The only reason that its not required reading is that I didn't
want to require you to buy the book.
- "Flik's
Digital Adventure." On-line web page.
- This is a very basic web page, targetted at showing kids how
"A Bug's Life" was made. What I find interesting about is that it
tells the Pixar story: focussing on story and preproduction.
- Animated Cartoons: How they are made, their origin and
development. E. G. Lutz.
- This is a 1920 book on animation that is neat because it
predates the "modern art" of animation. There is a modern reprint
available from Applewood Books.
-
General References on Computer Animation
- Hodgins, J. and O'Brien, J. Computer
Animation. To appear in The Encyclopedia of Computer Science.
- A brief summary of the entire field in 5 pages or less. Its a
quick way to get a lot of the buzwords down.
In acrobat format online.
- Tannenbaum, D. Why Files: Computer
Animation. On-line.
- "The Why Files" is a UW bi-weekly "on-line" magazine that
tries to make science topics interesting to the mass audience.
This story is a quick overview of animation, with a focus on
methods for the creation of motion. Too non-technical to be
useful, but fun.
- O'Rourke, M. 3D Computer Animation
Workshop. SIGGRAPH '98 Course Notes (course 34). On-line
as acrobat.
- These notes are a watered down version of his book
Principles of 3D Computer Animation which is more targetted
at artists and animators. These course notes intermix chapters of
text (which are nice since they'll teach you the buzzwords) with
walk-through tutorials to try things out. Unfortunately, these
tutorials use a software package called SoftImage. However, you
might read through them anyway to get a flavor of what another
system might look like.
NOTE: do not print out the whole acrobat file. It is quite long,
and not all of it is useful to you. While the whole thing is 79
pages long, there's really only 15-20 pages that are the "book"
and that's what you're really required to read.
Historically Important Papers
Many papers that are categorized by subject are also historically
important. These here just didn't go somewhere else.
- Catmull, E. A System for Computer
Generated Movies. Proceedings of the 1972 ACM annual
conference.
- What's amazing about this is that the problems he faced then
are still the problems we face now. This paper is more for
historical perspective than anything else.
- Catmull, E. The Problems of Computer
Assisted Animation. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '78.
- This paper layed out the issues that Ed saw in using a
computer to make animated films. Twenty years later, we have "A
Bugs Life." I included this paper in the reader the first year
because it gives some insight into the animation pipeline, and
what is hard (e.g. why inbetweening isn't trivial)
Unfortunately, this paper is a bit dated, and a bit too focussed
on improving the way traditional animators traditionally
work.
-
Maya
You will probably want to do some reading about Maya in order to
use it for the class. The Maya manuals may be scarse in print form,
but they are available on-line.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~cs838-1/Maya
The book "Learning Maya" is a tutorial
(note: there is a different book called "Introducing Maya"). The
easiest way to get started is to work through the examples in the
book. We will place the entire "learning Maya" CD on-line
(including all of the example files). The book is available in pdf
format in the course directory under
/p/course/cs838-gleicher/xtra/LEARNINGMAYA2.PDF. This pdf file is 27
megabytes and 577 pages, so I don't recommend you print it.
- There is a "preface chapter"
called Understanding Maya which gives you a quick feature
list for Maya. It is
on-line.REQUIRED
- Understanding Maya is required reading since it will give you
ideas about what kinds of things a 3D animation system does.
Rick Parent's Notes
Rick
Parent is a professor at Ohio State who teaches classes in
Computer Graphics and Animation. He has been putting together a book
on computer animation, that started out as a sequence of web
pages.
By arrangement with the publisher, we will be using a "beta-test"
version of the book this semester. The book is much better than the
web pages.
Quaternions and Rotations
Rotations are a tricky and important topic in animation.
Basically, it's difficult to represent a rotation in 3D. Any way that
you try to do it will have some problems. The most common ways to do
it in computer graphiucs/animation are Euler Angles, which turn out
to be really bad. Quaternions are a different way to do it that are
becoming more popular. They are not without their problems.
- Grassia, S. A Practical Formulation of the
Exponential Map for Rotations. To Appear in the Journal of
Graphics Tools.REQUIRED
- On-line Postscript. Acrobat.
This paper introduces an alternative to Quaternions and Euler
Angles that I think is very interesting. It's nice because it
discusses the problems with different types of
representations
- Shoemake, K. Animating Rotation with
Quaternion Curves. SIGGRAPH '85. (the original version has some
known typos, in the SIGGRAPH '91 Course Notes "Math for Computer
Graphics" it is reprinted with
corrections).SEMINAL
- This is "the" reference for Quaternions in computer graphics.
This paper is pretty much responsible for introducing the graphics
community to quaternions, so everyone cites it. Even if you learn
quaternions from elsewhere, you should be familiar with this
paper.
- Shoemake, K. Quaternion Calculus for Animation. SIGGRAPH '91
Course Notes "Math for Computer Graphics."
- This is a "lecture notes" version of his paper. Pretty much
the same material, but its important so its worth saying
again.
- Shoemake, K. Quaternions. On-line
paper. (citation unknown) REQUIRED
- Ken keeps writing newer versions of the Quaternions paper.
This one is nice since it is a little bit more formal, and also
gives you more intuitions why the mathematics works the ways it
does.
- Bobick, N. Rotating Objects Using Quaternions. Game Developer
Magazine, July 1998.
- I stumbled on this reference while searching the web for
Shoemake's stuff. It's a nice, consice, description that really
cuts to the chase of what you need to do to actually use
quaternions, along with some intuitions of why.
On
line version.
- Murray, R. Li, Z. and Sastry, S. A Mathematical Introduction
to Robotic Manipulation. CRC Press, 1994.
- This book is the only place I ever really saw exponential
coordinates discussed in any kind of useful way (until the very
recent graphics and vision papers).
Shoemake, K. and Duff, T. Matrix
Animation and Polar Decompositions.
- The moral of the story is that you don't want to interpolate
matrices. This paper is an attempt to try to do it, if you really
have to.
Compressed
Postscript.
-
Constraints
Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad system invented constraints. It
basically invented interactive graphics too. In 1962, Sutherland was
doing direct manipulation, interactive animation, constraints, ... It
is important to know about this system, if just to be in awe of what
he achieved that far back. I am not sure what paper to recommend to
people. SEMINAL
My thesis
was about how to use constraints for interactive graphics. One of its
strongest points is that it took an incredibly general view of what
constraints and objects are, which I think is very valuable for
animation. Some of the chapters will be required reading, because
they describe things the way I like to describe them:
- Chapter 3 - Differential Methods - describes how to do
"simulation-like" optimization, and talks about how to handle many
of the nasty cases like over-constrained systems.
- Chapter 4 - Efficient Solution Methods - is generally full of
useful tricks on how to make numerical constraint stuff go
fast.
- Chapter 5 - Snap-Together Math - talks about how to implement
the constraint stuff in a general way.
- Witkin, A. Fleischer, K. and
Barr, A. Energy Constraints on Parameterized Models. Proceedings
SIGGRAPH '87.
- This paper is significant because it really was the first
place to talk about constraints in a general way, rather than
specific geometric attributes. For animation, it is interesting
because it has the notion of making animation by having things
self-assemble. They got very interesting results using very simple
methods.
Postscript(Compressed)
Acrobat
- Surles, M. An Algorithm with Linear
Complexity for Interactive, Physically-Based, Modeling of Large
Proteins
- This paper is interesting because it goes to extremes to
achieve interactive rates on the "physics" computations. Where my
work at the time was stressing dynamicness (e.g. the user was
changing the constraints), Mark was pushing the limits on the
number of constraints.
A current page on the SCULPT
system, or look at the page of the company
mark founded to market it.
Particle Systems
Particle systems are a very basic technique in computer graphics.
So basic, that no one bothers to write much about them. However, with
a bit of hackery, they turn into a general purpose method for
modeling lots of different things, and have been used to do a wide
range of effects.
- William T. Reeves, "Particle
Systems - A Technique for Modeling a Class of Fuzzy Objects",
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol 2:2.
- This is the original paper about particle systems. Well, the
original paper was the 1982 SIGGRAPH paper, of which this is an
extended version.
An on-line
summary of the paper is available.
Physics
The primary text for physics will be the
SIGGRAPH
course notes put together by Andy Witkin and David Baraff. They
were nice enough to put them online, and some of them I'm putting
into the course reader. Often, this is material from papers (some of
which are on the reading list too), but where there is duplication,
this set of notes is a better tutorial. They contain:
- Witkin, A. and Gleicher, M.
and Welch, W. Interactive Dynamics. Proceedings of the 1990
Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics.
REQUIRED
- I think this is the first place where the equations for doing
constrained dynamics (and generalized IK) are written out in a
usable form.
Acrobat
Postscript
Witkin, A. and Welch, W. Fast Animation and
Control of Nonrigid Structures. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '90.
REQUIRED
- This paper takes a cute idea - that if you have a simple
deformation as your modeling primitive, you can simulate physics
on it really easily, and builds it into a whole system.
Recommended reading since it actually works through all the
physics (which is possible because they are so simple). You will
probably catch me calling this work "troids," which is what we
called it at the time.
Postscript
Acrobat
Al Barr's group at Caltech was doing important
"Physically-Based Modelling" work in the late 80s. At SIGGRAPH '88,
they published 2 papers. Both of which were superceded with later
journal or book versions.
- Platt, J. and Barr, A. Constraint-Methods for Flexible Models.
Proceedings SIGGRAPH '88.
- This paper is generally superceded by Platt's later journal
paper. This is really the first paper to use good mathematical
methods to simulate general constraints. When it came out, I
didn't quite understand how it related to what we were doing
at CMU.
- Platt, J. A Generalization of Dynamic Constraints. CVGIP:
Graphical Models and Image Processing, vol. 54, no. 6, November,
pp. 516-525, (1992).
- A much cleaned up version of the SIGGRAPH paper. The
techniques are closely related to the ones we were using at CMU. I
prefer our notation, so I am requiring our papers instead of this
one.
- Barzell, R. and Barr, A. A Modeling System Based on Dynamic
Constraints. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '88.
- This paper is basically about how to define objects by taking
simpler objects, hooking them together with constraints, and then
letting physics pull them together. This paper is nice in terms of
its philosophy, but hard to read for its notation. It's also
impossible to photocopy because of the small print, so I'm not
putting it on the reading list.
- Miller, G. The Motion Dynamics of
Snakes and Worms. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '88.
- A nice paper because it shows how simple methods can be used
to nice effect, when they are appropriate.
- Baraff, D and Witkin, A. Large
Steps in Cloth Simulation. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '98.
- The current state of the art in cloth simulation. Interesting
because it shows how the weaker methods are unacceptable.
High-Level Control of Physical Objects
- Miller, G. The Motion Dynamics of
Snakes and Worms. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '88.
REQUIRED
- A nice paper because it shows how simple methods can be used
to nice effect, when they are appropriate.
- Barzell, R. Physically-Based Modelling for Computer Graphics.
Academic Press, 1992.
- This book is more philosophy than technique,
unfortunately.
Spacetime Constraints
- Witkin, A. and Kass, M. Spacetime
Constraints. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '88.
SEMINAL
REQUIRED
- This paper introduced spacetime constraints, and provided
results that were compelling enough to make it hard for anyone
else to follow.
Postscript
Acrobat
- Cohen, M. Spacetime Windows.
Siggraph '92.
- A system for doing Spacetime.
- Zicheng Liu, Steve Gortler, and
Michael F. Cohen, Hierarchical Spacetime Control, SIGGRAPH 94
(Orlando, Florida, July 24-29, 1994)
- This paper shows how to use wavelets to make spacetime go
faster and be more robust.
Postscript
- J. Thomas Ngo and Joe Marks,
"Spacetime Constraints Revisited," SIGGRAPH 93 Conference
Proceedings, pp. 343-350, Anaheim, CA, August, 1993.
- Shows how to evolve creature behaviors by genetic programming.
Makes neat motions
Compressed
Postscript
- Joel Auslander and Alex Fukunaga and Hadi Partovi and Jon
Christensen and Lloyd Hsu and Peter Reiss and Andrew Shuman and
Joe Marks and J. Thomas Ngo, "Towards Practical Automated Motion
Synthesis," Transactions on Graphics, 1995, To appear.
- This is the updated "long form" of the SIGGRAPH paper. They
changed solver methods midstream.
- Sims, K. Evolving Virtual
Creatures. SIGGRAPH '94.
- This not only synthesizes the motions, but synthesizes the
creatures that go along with it.
Here's a website
about the work.
-
FilmMaking
The main references and required readings are on the books
page. You must pick one of these
- Katz, S. Film Directing, Shot by Shot.
REQUIRED
- NOTE: what is really required is to read something about
cinematography. This is the best choice.
This is a great book on cinematography. Chapters 6 and 7 will give
you a good overview of how to compose pictures and how to use
camera movement. The final half of the book is more and more
examples. The early part of the book does an excellent job of
discussing storyboards.
- Cantine, Howard, and Lewis. Shot by
Shot. REQUIRED
- NOTE: this specific book isn't required, something covering
its content is.
As I mention on the books page, this is an excellent, brief
introduction to the basics. For the cinematography lecture, read
chapters 3 (composition), 4 (continuity), 5 (editing), and
preferably 7 (lighting). The book is very brief.
These papers are interesting attempts to use filmmaking knowledge
in animation tools. They would make for interesting projects.
- He, L. Cohen, M. and Salesin, D. The
Virtual Cinematographer: A Paradigm for Automatic, Real-Time
Camera Control and Directing. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '96.
- An implementation of the concepts for filming dialog,
including camera placement and shot selection.
- Drucker, S and Zeltzer, D. Intellegent
Camera Control in a Virtual Environment. Proceedings 1995
Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics.
- An interesting system for planning complex camera motions
based on the other objects in the world.
Kinematics and Inverse Kinematics
The basics of kinematics (hierarchical modeling) are so
imbedded in graphics that there really is no good reference. You
should be familiar with the basic ideas (forward kinematics) from
your earlier courses.
Inverse Kinematics (the problem of determining what joint angles
correspond to desired end-effector configurations) is a special case
of constraint solving. However, its also an essential problem in
computer graphics. I don't know of a definitive reference.
People are too busy "just doing it" to write about it. I'm sure there
are good references out there in the robotics literature.
- Maciejewski, A. Dealing with the
Ill-Conditioned Equations of Motion for Articulated Figures. IEEE
Computer Graphics and Applications, May 1990.
REQUIRED
- I am requiring this paper because it discusses some of the
basic problems with doing IK in a nice way. I'm not sold on his
solution to the problems (and this paper is a bit dated), but it a
good paper for making you think.
- Zhao, J and Badler, N. Inverse
Kinematics Positioning Using Nonlinear Programming for Highly
Articulated Figures. ACM Transactions on Graphics, October 1994.
REQUIRED
- This is as close as it gets to a definitive work. The basic
idea, that IK is a non-linear constraint solving problem, so feed
it to a non-linear constraint solver, seems so obvious, but this
is really the place where they wrote it down. It is probably
better to learn the optimization algorithms from an optimization
text.
- Wellman, C. Inverse Kinematics and Geometric Constraints for
Articulated Figure Manipulation.
- This is slightly obscure, but it has a nice survey for its
related work section, and actually discusses a lot of the details
and compares many different approaches.
You can get a copy on-line.
- Issacs and Cohen. Controlling Dynamic
Simulation with Kinematic Constraints, Behavior Functions, and
Inverse Dynamics. Proceedings SIGGRAPH '87.
- This paper is important since its really the first place where
the put together inverse dynamics and animator control. There
methods are a bit simplistic by today's standards (and have been
superceded), but they did get things to work.
Motion Capture
- Bobby Bodenheimer, Charles Rose,
Seth Rosenthal, and John Pella . The Process of Motion Capture:
Dealing with the Data. Computer Animation and Simulation '97.
Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop.
- Postscript
Acrobat
To be honest, the main thing about this paper is that it was the
first academic look at motion capture issues.
- Scott Dyer, Jeff Martin, John
Zulauf. Motion Capture White Paper
- On-line
This is as good a technology overview as I can find easily.
Beware: it was a bit dated the first time it was on the course
reader. However, it is great for getting you to understand the
terms involved.
- Michael Gleicher. Animation from
Observation: Motion Capture and Motion Editing. Computer Graphics
33(4). on-line
pdf
- A discussion of why mocap is hard, and why technology alone
won't cure its problems. A position paper, but it is still my
position.