(reading due before class, Wednesday, January 30th)
I always like to start out with a few seminal papers. Stuff that’s so old that its hard to imagine, but still worth having seen. Looking at these papers are mainly a history lesson.
This list is the same as it was long ago, and it was re-iterated by the appearance of a “seminal papers list” from SIGGRAPH. (You might want to look at it, since many of the other ones are historically interesting too. I can’t say I’ve read all of them).Several of the topics on the animation list, we will get to later in the semester (faces, animation principles, flocks). And the legged animation paper we will replace by another early paper by the same authors.
Since the topic we’ll discuss is really about how animation is done and what animation systems must do, I’m adding a third old paper as a requirement.
Read these papers – they are really old, and the details don’t quite matter. You should be able to get the general gist quickly.
- A System for Computer Generated Movies. E. Catmull. ACM ’72 Proceedings of the ACM annual conference. (ACM DL page).
- Interactive Skeleton Techniques for Enhancing Motion Dynamics in Key Frame Animation. N. Burtnyk and Marceli Wein. CACM, October 1976. (ACM DL Page) (The most famous film from this effort, The Hunger, is online). We might watch some of it in class – otherwise, have a look at it.
- Reeves, Ostby and Leffler. The Menv Modelling and Animation Environment. Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, 1 (1):33-40. (pdf in protected course reader). This paper describes how Pixar did it in the old days. Unfortunately, the only copy I have of this paper is pretty bad.
After reading these three papers, I want you to write (briefly) about what you’ve learned. (these questions are mainly for 1&2)
- Why do you think I asked you to read these ancient papers?
- What can we learn from them for the “modern” era?
- For the MENV paper: what are the key concepts of the system?
I’ll ask you to post your replies to Moodle. The forum is here. It’s a bit of an experiment to see how Moodle will work for reading discussions.
Please read and make your posting by 9am on Wednesday, January 30th (so I can look at them before class).
