Assignment 1
Modifying Motion Capture and Keyframing
DUE: 4/24/97

This assignment consists of two parts, the first focuses on modifying a given motion capture sequence, and the second focuses on keyframing a motion sequence for a character. You will use Alias/Wavefront 7.0 for both these projects.

The command line: /usr/aw/alias/bin/Alias can be used to start up Alias from an SGI machine in the SGI lab.

Part 1 - Motion modification

In the file /net/hg27/animation/models/alias/class_skel1, you will find a human-like character with motion curves animating each joint. The captured motion is of a broad jump. However, in the final animation, a large box appears where the character is supposed to land. Your job is to modify the motion data so that the character avoids the box by landing in one of four different ways. The character may:

  • Land on the box
  • Land in front of the box
  • Land past the box
  • Do a flip and land on the box (most challenging!)

    You only have to implement one of these solutions. However, your motion should remain believable. Minimize unnatural and impossible motion such as infinite accelerations, obvious abuse of "gravity", and unrealistic body postures. Handles for modifying motion curves will be discussed in the alias tutorial in class.

    Part2 - Keyframing

    In the file /net/hg27/animation/models/alias/class_dino1, you will find a dinosaur character to use for a short keyframed animation. The dinosaur includes an inverse kinematics "skeleton" to aid in the keyframing process. An overview of this will be introduced in class.

    Your job will be to animate this dinosaur with a natural set of behaviors by moving its body, head, arms, legs and tail. Your animation should include at least a few walking or running steps and may include attacking, eating, resting, or playing behaviors. Your animated piece should run approximately 100 frames. Be creative!

    Although default lighting and scenery will be satisfactory, feel free to add to your animation as you see fit. Alias provides many options in terms of shading, modeling, lighting and cameras. Note that rendering may take some time so plan ahead.

    What to hand in

    For both parts you should include a set of rendered images. The images should be in SGI format at 720x486 resolution (the Abekas "old" size as mentioned in the Alias "Render Globals" menu). Rendering smaller test images is recommended for debugging. Store your final images in your cs8113f directory and send a pointer with your final write-up. We will let you know when you can delete your frames.

    Your final write-up should include a short description of what you did for each part, the problems you ran into and the new concepts you learned about modifying motion capture by hand and keyframing as well as a pointer to your final frames.