Animation

It's been more than 20 years since Jordan Mechner used videos of his brother running and jumping as a reference to design in-game movements for the Prince of Persia video game. Things have come a long way since 1989, with sophisticated motion-capture technologies being developed. One of the latest innovations in digital modeling technology is a miniature 3D motion-capture figure dubbed QUMA, which is connectible to a PC via a simple USB plug. Read More

In the creation of the film Avatar, director James Cameron invented a system called Simul-cam. It allowed him to see the video output of the cameras, in real time, but with the human actors digitally altered to look like the alien creatures whom they were playing. The system also negated the need for a huge amount of animation – every performance was captured in all its blue-skinned, pointy-eared majesty as it happened, so it didn’t need to be created from scratch on a computer. Now, researchers from the University of Abertay Dundee have built on the techniques pioneered by Simul-cam to create a new system, that lets users act as their own cameraperson within a 3D environment. Read More

Adobe is not the only company preparing for the heralded death of Flash on the web. Sencha has announced the developer preview of a new CSS3-based animation tool for the creation of rich media animations in HTML5-enabled browsers. The new desktop application is said to allow developers to bring web animations to life without having to mess around with hundreds of lines of complicated code. Read More

Pretty much since it was announced HTML5 has been touted by many pundits as signaling the death of Adobe’s Flash. Whether or not that eventuates, only time will tell but a tool being developed by Adobe codenamed Edge is only likely to fan the flames for those predicting Flash’s demise. Still only in prototype form, Edge is an HTML5 animation tool that makes it easy for web developers and designers to create animations and transitions without having to slug through line after line of HTML5 code. Read More

Anyone who’s had a look at our Yez concept car story will know that the Chinese Government haven’t taken any half measures with Expo 2010 in Shanghai. In an absolutely frightening display of power and wealth it splashed out roughly US$60 billion on the event – that’s more than the GDP of two thirds of the world’s nations. China’s foreign currency reserves currently amount to the greatest fortune ever assembled anywhere at any time on planet earth – US$2.5 trillion – and they're only just getting started with accumulating wealth. The theme of the Shanghai expo is “Better City – Better Life” and, while a lot of the focus is on technological inventions and advancements, the goal of the Chinese Pavilion is to show the past, present and future. There is no better illustration of this than the centerpiece of the Pavilion – a stunning digital tapestry that takes one of China’s most famous paintings and updates it for the 21st Century. If you were impressed by the beautiful moving scroll that wowed audiences at the Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies in 2008, then prepare to be blown away all over again. Read More

With oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig continuing to spew into the Gulf of Mexico researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have produced an animated computer simulation that shows the potential spread of the oil over a period of 360 days from when the spill started. To calculate the particle dispersal the researchers used ocean flow data from simulations conducted with the high-resolution Ocean General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator (OFES). Read More

This is one of those ingenious inventions that’s so simple, it’s amazing no one’s come up with it until now. A team of Art and Design students at the University of Michigan have created a prototype electronic doodle pad called the Scribble that animates your drawings. You simply hand-draw a series of successive images on it, then it runs them all together in a Flash-like cartoon. Why didn’t I think of that? Read More

June 27, 2007 Fitting squarely in the “I wish they had these when I was a kid” category, this DIY Animated Movie Maker lets you create animated movies and cartoons at home using your own action figures, drawings, posters, toys… or anything that your imagination can come-up with. The Marvel Heroes themed “Ani-movie Studio” is an integrated movie stage and digital camera that enables creation of animated movies – including sound effects – that can be played back on your TV. Read More

August 3, 2005 The world’s most important computer graphics showcase SIGGRAPH 2005 opened yesterday with a rash of new important announcements and techniques to be seen on the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center, though none are likely to have the far reaching ramifications of SoftImage Face Robot, a revolutionary new facial animation technology. Face Robot software is the first technology that allows 3-D artists to achieve realistic, lifelike facial animation for high-end film, post and games projects. The technology is built on a new computer model of facial soft tissue that mimics the full range of emotions portrayed by the human face. SIGGRAPH attendees made a bee-line to the Avid Computer Graphics booth to experience the Face Robot system. The technology offers artists a very intuitive way to interact with CG characters while providing precise control over facial details, including wrinkles, frowns, flaring nostrils and bulging neck muscles. Read More