Scribd
Upload
325 views

Character Animation

Modern 3D games use character animation systems to imbue characters with natural motion. These systems simulate both rigid and non-rigid motion, allowing animated vehicles, machinery, and other objects. Early techniques included cel and sprite animation, while modern games often use skinned animation, which uses a hidden skeletal structure and skin mesh to allow more realistic deformation as characters move.

Uploaded by

Mahara Jothi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
325 views

Character Animation

Modern 3D games use character animation systems to imbue characters with natural motion. These systems simulate both rigid and non-rigid motion, allowing animated vehicles, machinery, and other objects. Early techniques included cel and sprite animation, while modern games often use skinned animation, which uses a hidden skeletal structure and skin mesh to allow more realistic deformation as characters move.

Uploaded by

Mahara Jothi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 22

Character Animation

Character animation

 Modern 3D games revolve around characters - often human or humanoid, sometimes

animal or alien.

 Characters are unique because they need to move in a fluid, organic way.

 Simulate and animate rigid objects like vehicles, projectiles, soccer balls and Tetris pieces.

 The task of imbuing characters with natural-looking motion is handled by an engine

component known as the character animation system.


Character animation
 An animation system gives game designers a powerful suite of tools that can be
applied to non-characters as well as characters.

 Any game object that is not 100% rigid can take advantage of the animation system.

 Whenever you see a vehicle with moving parts, a piece of articulated machinery,
trees waving gently in the breeze or even an exploding building in a game, chances
are good that the object makes at least partial use of the game engine’s animation
system.
Types of character animation

 Cel animation

 Rigid Hierarchical Animation

 Per-Vertex Animation and Morph Targets

 Skinned Animation

 Animation Methods as Data Compression Techniques


Traditional animation
 The precursor to all game animation techniques
 The illusion of motion is produced by displaying a
sequence of still pictures known as frames in rapid
succession.
 Real-time 3D rendering is as an electronic form of
traditional animation
 A sequence of still full-screen images is presented to
the viewer over and over to produce the illusion of
motion.
 Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of
images to create an illusion of movement
Cartoon Character Animation
 Traditional Animation was replaced with 2D Computer Animation circa 1990 while still using
the concepts of static backgrounds, key framing, animation cycles, etc.
Cel animation
 Cel animation is a traditional animation.

 A cel is a transparent sheet of plastic on


which images can be painted or drawn.

 An animated sequence of cels can be


placed on top of a fixed background
painting or drawing to produce the illusion
of motion without having to redraw the static
background over and over.
Cel animation

 The drawings are drawn in layers, and stacked before photographing


them

 Saves time, since the background and static objects only need to be
drawn once

 Can archive and reuse canned animation cycles (sequences of cels) for
running, jumping, etc.
Sprite animation
 A sprite is a small bitmap that can be overlaid on top of a fullscreen background
image without disrupting it, often drawn with the aid of specialized graphics
hardware.

 A sprite is to 2D game animation what a cel was to traditional animation.

 The sequence of frames was designed so that it animates smoothly even when it is
repeated indefinitely—this is known as a looping animation.
Sprite animation
 This particular animation would be called a run cycle in modern parlance,
because it makes the character appear to be running.

 Characters typically have a number of looping animation cycles, including


variousidle cycles, a walk cycle and a run cycle.
Rigid Hierarchical Animation
 The earliest approach to 3D character animation is a technique known as rigid
hierarchical animation.
 A character is modeled as a collection of rigid pieces.
 A typical breakdown for a humanoid character might be body, upper arms, lower
arms, upper legs, lower legs, hands, feet and head.
 The rigid pieces are constrained to one another in a hierarchical fashion,
analogous to the manner in which a mammal’s bones are connected at the joints.
 This allows the character to move naturally.
Rigid Hierarchical Animation
Rigid Hierarchical Animation
Per-Vertex Animation and Morph Targets

 In this approach, the vertices of the mesh are animated by an artist, and motion data is
exported which tells the game engine how to move each vertex at runtime.

 This technique can produce any mesh deformation imaginable (limited only by the
tessellation of the surface).

 However, it is a data-intensive technique, since time-varying motion information must be


stored for each vertex of the mesh.

 For this reason, it has little application to real-time games.


Per-Vertex Animation and Morph Targets
Per-Vertex Animation and Morph Targets
 A variation on this technique known as morph target animation is used in some real-time
games.

 In this approach, the vertices of a mesh are moved by an animator to create a relatively
small set of fixed, extreme poses.

 Animations are produced by blending between two or more of these fixed poses at
runtime.

 The position of each vertex is calculated using a simple linear interpolation (LERP) between
the vertex’s positions in each of the extreme poses
Per-Vertex Animation and Morph Targets

 The morph target technique is often used for facial animation, because the
human face is an extremely complex piece of anatomy, driven by roughly
50 muscles.

 Morph target animation gives an animator full control over every vertex of
a facial mesh, allowing him or her to produce both subtle and extreme
movements that approximate the musculature of the face well.
Per-Vertex Animation and Morph Targets
Per-Vertex Animation and Morph Targets
Skinned Animation
 As the capabilities of game hardware improved further, an animation technology known as
skinned animation was developed.

 This technique has many of the benefits of per-vertex and morph target animation—
permitting the triangles of an animated mesh to deform.

 But it also enjoys the much more-efficient performance and memory usage characteristics of
rigid hierarchical animation.

 It is capable of producing reasonably realistic approximations to the movement of skin and


clothing.
Per-Vertex Animation and Morph Targets
Skinned Animation
 In skinned animation, a skeleton is constructed from rigid “bones
,” just as in rigid hierarchical animation.

 However, instead of rendering the rigid pieces on-screen, they


remain hidden.

 A smooth continuous triangle mesh called a skin is bound to the


joints of the skeleton; its vertices track the movements of the
joints.

 Each vertex of the skin mesh can be weighted to multiple joints,


so the skin can stretch in a natural way as the joints move.

You might also like