An Artistic Walk Through Time
This project required quite a bit of research and creativity. New ways of doing image metamorphosis were invented to solve tricky problems with generating the in-between frames from the key frames of animation and morphing the separate animated sequences into each other.
The morphing strategy that is used is triangulation based. This requires that all the images that are to be morphed into each other have compatible triangulations. For this reason, triangulated meshes were created to be manipulated by a user specify the right correspondences between two images. Specifying these triangulated meshes is at the moment very time consuming and tedious. One of the areas of our research looks for ways to automate this and increase the speed and flexibility of such a job.
In the beginning of the concept of the project, some sample key frames were generated to test and see if and how this animated morph would work. Using the code already written for the M.I.C.A. (Morph Interpolated Character Animation) project, we could do fairly impressive in-betweening between the key frames of this animation. It was found that only four key frames would be needed to do a continuously looped walk sequence.
The idea for the animated morph was to take two animated sequences of images and then morph the sequences of images together so that the character moves at the same time that he is morphing. For example, let’s say you want to morph Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck while he is lifting his arm. You would start off with two animated sequences – one of Mickey lifting his arm and one of Donald doing the same. The first image in the final morph would be Mickey with his arm lowered and the last would be Donald with his arm raised. The image exactly half way through the animation would be a fifty percent morph of Mickey and Donald with their hand out to the side. To accomplish this, it was decided to save out a sequence of animations with their corresponding meshes. The animations would then be reloaded in and morphed at different percentages. The resulting image would then be saved out as a frame in the new morphed animated sequence. This was tested and proved to be fairly successful while introducing some new challenges that would need to be resolved.
The artwork also had to be created. Four key frames were needed for each figured to be animated and morphed. Watercolor, colored pencil and graphite were the mediums chosen to give the best effect. The motion of the animation had to be studied out and decided upon before any of these key frames were created, transferred to a nice material and colored.
The most difficult and time-consuming part of this project was creating the correspondences in between the key frames of animation. This gave insight as to one of the major problems that should be looked into with the M.I.C.A. project.
Why This Project is Creative
This project is creative in several areas. First of all, the software was developed by Dr. Sederberg, Adam Helps, some minor things from other students, and myself. Developing a peice of software that would be able to perform such a function required a lot of work and creative ideas to solve many of the challenges associtated with it.
Next, all the art work was generated by myself (except for the photos of Dr. Strong which I creatively took ^_^) using my artistic talents.
Finally, I believe that the concept itself is creative. It was something we hadn't done in the lab before and doing this project required that I enhance the capability of the software.