Computer Animation & Visualisation Module

Lecturer

Lecture Times

• Tuesday, Friday: 16:10-17:00 WRB G.02, George Square

Syllabus

• character animation techniques : keyframe animation, inverse kinematics, facial animation, pd-control, flocking, crowd simulation
• motion capture technologies: optical, magnetic, mechanical, gyrosensors
• optimization-based techniques: space-time constraints, Laplacian distance shape deformation
• physically based animation techniques : fluid animation, hair animation, cloth simulation, deformable objects, crack simulation
• non-photo realistic rendering
• Visualisation: definition and motivation
• Data representation: geometric abstractions; volume and surface representations, interpolation.
• Fundamental algorithms: colour mapping; contouring; glyphs; volume rendering
• Advanced algorithms: flow visualisation, vector visualisation, tensor visualisation.
• Information visualisation: networks and trees; document visualisation.

Activities

1. 18 lectures on the above syllabus.
2. 2 assessed practical exercises.

Assessment

All practical work is covered by the school policy on plagiarism and students are advised to be fully aware of this when submitting practical work.

• Lecture Notes

  • Lecture 1 Introduction - 13th January 2009
      Lecture Note [PDF]
    
  • Lecture 2 Basics of Character Animation - 15th January 2010
      Lecture Note [PDF]
    
  • Lecture 3 Motion Capture and Physically-based Character Animation - 19th January 2010
      Lecture Note [PDF]
    
  • Lecture 4 Skinning / Rigging - 22nd January 2010
      Lecture Note [PDF]
    
  • Lecture 5 Motion Editing / Motion Graph - 26th January 2010
      Lecture Note [PDF]
    
  • Lecture 6 Facial Animation - 29th January 2010
      Lecture Note [PDF]
    
  • Lecture 7 Particle System - 2nd Feburary 2010
      Lecture Note [PDF] demo program (includes the demo of Euler and Verlet integration, and the particle system by Jakobsen [particle.tgz]
    
  • Lecture 8 Crowd Simulation - 5th Feburary 2010
      Lecture Note [PDF]
    

• Assignments

  • Assignment 1
    

  Reading List

  The following texts are recommended to additionally support the course but are not essential. Most are available from the university library.
  • Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics), Richard Parent
  • "Real-time Rendering", Akenine-Moller, Haines, AK Peters
  • SIGGRAPH computer animation course http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/animation/anim0.htm
  • Shroeder, Martin & Lorenson, 'The Visualization Toolkit', 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 1998. (or 3rd Edition)
  • Kitware Inc. Edited by W.J. Shroeder, 'The Visualisation Toolkit User's Guide', Prentice Hall,
  • Spence 'Information Visualization', Addison-Wesley, 2001. Good for the topic of information visualisation.

  ---

  This page is maintained by the course lecturer, Taku Komura, tkomura@inf.ed.ac.uk, room IF1.23, Informatics Forum, ext 513445 [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive]