Procedural Cartoon Animation
Description
This is a prototype created in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow that a group of us five students did. We are Sachi Arafat, Sachin Badiani, Christopher Bayliss, Matthew Hanlon, and Hassen Shehzad.
Technology such as graphics orientated systems from Silicon Graphics fail to replace the traditional cartoon animator or automate to a reasonable degree the noticeably expensive process of in-betweening. It is the particular drawing style of each cartoonist that characterizes a cartoon and also poses the main problem in automating the cartoon animation process. This prototype intends to address some of these problems and aimed to provide "procedural cartoon animation".
We used a spreadsheet interface for graphical objects as devised by Marc Levoy's paper (Spreadsheet For Images, SIGGRAPH 96). Each column represents a frame and each row represents a layer. The user defines what type of effect they would like (such as reading from a file, compositing, or using the particle engine graphical user interface (GUI)). These are then rendered and placed on the spreadsheet. A video can be created.
Code parameters include the number of particles wanted, what their velocities are, what colour scheme to use as each particle's life changes. Paths for particles can be made, and wind and gravity can affect particle movement. Standard effects possible include fire and rain. We will include a lot more in the future.
We used Java SDK 1.4.0 to build this project. Video files are saved in one file containing PNG byte arrays. This allows huge savings in disk space, and since PNG is a loss less format, you do not get the artefacts that are apparent in compression of cartoons. A video of length 61 frames takes on average 400KB. We did not use the Java Media Framework since there is incompatibility between it and Java SDK 1.4.0 (although I hear that Sun have fixed some bugs….).
We have also used Batik. Quote from the Batik website: “Batik is a Java(tm) technology based toolkit for applications or applets that want to use images in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format for various purposes, such as viewing, generation or manipulation.”
At the moment, the project is being transferred to open source through the CUSTODIEV user group (artists and animators at over 400 European sites) and in future years the CUSTODIEV website will be a place where students can go to find possible projects for themselves involving creative arts. The website for CUSTODIEV will be up some time in 2003.
CUSTODIEV is a Framework V Project targeted at developing cartoon animation technology using the Open Source model in some parts of the animation data-path. It intends to promote collaborations between artists and technologists, animation and dynamic art projects which require new technology to be developed by the model of ‘creative pull’, and a virtual, laboratory for learning about ‘creative pull’ and how to promote ‘creative pull’ projects.
If you are interested in helping out with the prototype, please feel free to contact me.
I will update this website in the near future.
Sachin Badiani
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Last update : 12/10/2002 11:25