The command line: /usr/aw/alias/bin/Alias can be used to start up Alias from an SGI machine in the SGI lab.
Online documentation for Alias/Wavefront can be reached from a web browser
by opening:
file: /usr/aw/alias/Help/Learning_Alias/Intro1_LearningTOC2.doc.html
In the file /net/hg27/animation/models/alias/Drummer_mot, you will find
a sand character from "Alien Occurrence" with motion curves animating its joints. The captured
motion is of a person drumming. Your job is to modify
the motion data so that the character hits the drum in a new location. You
may:
move the drum so that it is much higher or lower than the original
move the drum so that it is farther to the left, right or front of the character
make a second drum and have each hand play its own drum (in an appropriate location)
You should choose one of these options, you do not have to do all of them. Your goal is to achieve new contact locations for the drumming behavior. These location changes should be large enough to be noticable (> 0.1 meters). You may want to modify motion for other body parts such as the head to achieve more stylized motion. Your motion should remain believable. Minimize unnatural and impossible motion such as infinite accelerations, obvious abuse of "gravity," and unrealistic body postures. Drum contacts should be believable, that is, avoid hands missing the drum entirely or penetrating the drum severely. Handles for modifying motion curves will be discussed in the tutorial in class.
In the file /net/hg27/animation/models/alias/Drummer_skel_class, you will find a sand character to use for a short keyframed animation. The sand creature includes an inverse kinematic "skeleton" to aid in the keyframing process as well as constraints on the feet to avoid sliding ground contact. An overview on these tools will be introduced in class.
Your job is to animate this creature with a natural set of behaviors by moving its body, head, arms, and legs. 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. Props can be added, too. Alias provides many options in terms of shading, modeling, lighting and cameras. Note that rendering may take some time so plan ahead.
For both parts, you should turn in a separate quicktime moviefile. The command below
will transform a sequence of images, "imagefile.*.rgb", to a quicktime file "outfile.mov":
dmconvert -v -f qt -p video,rate=30,comp=qt_anim imagefile.*.rgb outfile.mov
The images should be rendered using Alias in SGI format at 360x243 resolution. Store your final images and moviefile in your /net/hg121/ directory and include a pointer in your final write-up. We will let you know when you can delete your frames.
You should play your moviefile before you turn it in to be sure that the
conversion worked. The movieplayer program is run like this:
/usr/sbin/movieplayer outfile.mov
You can look at individual images from the command line using:
/usr/sbin/ipaste imagefile.0001.rgb
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 and movie files.
Grading will be broken down as follows:
Part 1.....10
Part 2.....10
Report.... 5
Total .....25