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3-D Animation
The Future is Now

 

If you grew up with Walt Disney’s Fantasia–or wish you had–you’ll wish you hadn’t missed the presentation on 3-D character animation at the June 8th DACS General Meeting. Dr. William Joel, Director of the Center for Graphics Research at Western Connecticut State University led an enlightening, if not wholly animated, discussion of the latest techniques behind Shrek and other blockbuster 3-D cartoon productions.

3-D Character Animation is the use of computer graphics to create three-dimensional characters Like 2-D animation, it relies on a knowledge of acting. Unlike 2-D animation, it requires a sense of 3-D space. This involves painstaking recreation of articulated figures, with a forensic scientist’s understanding of skin, hair, clothing, facial expressions, acting & Emotions. Efforts are made to simulate real body features and to articulate them as they would function in the real environment. Among the difficult challenges are translucent skin color and texture, limits on movement of joints, differentiation of individual hairs, and complex facial expressions indicating emotions such as sorrow, anger, fear, joy, disgust and surprise.

The future is truly awesome, with 3-D animation becoming ubiquitous on the Web, and new software giving the home user access to tools only movie studios and graphic designers once had.

Unfortunately, all this power in the hands of amateurs will likely give bad taste and bad design equal billing with the creations of our great film makers.

This was not your typical DACS meeting. Dr. William J. Joel did not show us how to use any specific software; in fact, he didn’t even tell us what software they use at West Conn until he was pressed during the question and answer period. What he did do was discuss how animation has changed over the years, how computer animation has come into its own in recent years and what it takes to produce an animated video. A knowledge of the basic concepts of animation, he explained, will enable you to use any software available.

Note that the issue here is not “how to produce” but “what it takes to produce” an animated video. There is a big difference. Dr. Joel described the process he teaches his students at West Conn. This includes story boarding, character development, and the fine arts side of animation - acting. When an artist tells a story through an animated character, the artist is acting through that character. The artist must convey emotion, not just the story lines.

It was unfortunate that Dr. Joel could not play any of the videos produced by students due to a lack of software on the podium PC; and without an Internet connection, he could not activate the links to animation Web sites.


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