Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!shawnee.cis.ohio-state.edu!sarrel From: sarrel@shawnee.cis.ohio-state.edu (Marc Sarrel) Newsgroups: comp.graphics Subject: Re: Best of 1989 SIGGRAPH Message-ID: Date: 9 Aug 89 22:46:14 GMT References: <89080823183434@masnet.uucp> <5056@alvin.mcnc.org> Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 32 In-reply-to: spl@mcnc.org's message of 9 Aug 89 15:06:33 GMT In article <5056@alvin.mcnc.org> spl@mcnc.org (Steve Lamont) writes: By the way, my own personal choice for best of the show (from a technical point of view, not as far as content -- which was practically nil), was Eurhythmy by Susan Amkraut and Michael Girard from Ohio State ACCAD. The synthetic camera work was absolutely fabulous. These folks have obviously done *real* cinematography or have studied the subject very intently. Though the dancing figures had the usual computer graphics marionette quality to them, the choreography was still marvelous, as well. Well done!!!! Well, I've heard Michael Girard give a presentation on the motion control software he used to control the figures. He spoke at an animation seminar course I took here at OSU. He wrote his entire dissertation on the subject. It was _not_ a simple keyframe style animation. The animator specifies where, in general, he wants a figure to go, as well as information about the creature's gate and the system figures out footfalls and joint angles to satisfy the animator's desires. This system can, as shown in the film, handle two and four legged creatrues. I've also seen demos of creatures with many legs (about 14 or 16). Michael's system also handles changes in gate in an appropriate way (ie: going from walking to running or trotting to galloping). SIGGRAPH was the first time that I had seen the film in rendered form. It's been around, in various incarnations, as a wire frame for quite a while. --marc -=- "Master, why is the letter 'i' the symbol for current?" "Because there is no letter 'i' in the word 'current'." "Master, why do we use the letter 'j' for sqrt(-1)?" "Because we use the letter 'i' for current." Whereupon the Master struck the Disciple, and the Disciple became enlightened.