Also, these papers help define the key ‘steps’ in animation. For instance, the Catmull paper laid out the types of controls necessary for successfully developing a film making language, including collision detection and motion paths. These sorts of insights set the groundwork for the development of animation as a field.

To tie into the current lecture sequence, both papers also highlight the necessity of rotation and interpolation to animation development. The use of interpolation in both papers gives a practical grounding to the work we’ve studied thus far in class and also presents the ease of interpolation in computer-based animation as the key win in using automated methods over traditional hand animations.

Through these papers, we can discover the advantages and drawbacks of traditional ways of thinking about animation implementation. While current papers may take the shortcomings of these techniques for granted, looking at a focused analysis of these methods provides an analytical understanding of what’s going on in these foundational methods and can apply this understanding to more modern methods.

2. I wouldn’t want to say “what happened to research, if these were possible in the 70’s.. A lot of research since has allowed the widespread use of graphics. Its useful to remember that Quaternions was a 1800’s idea and only in the 90’s (?) did scientists think of using it widely in graphics in rotations. The problems we face now are many-a-time “make run faster”, “make look better” kinds.

The other two papers by i.e. Catmall (1972) and Burtynk (1976) provide an insight into researcher’s grand vision and creative ideas when computer systems were evolving. It is truely unbelievable that they had workable solutions when the computer RAM was less than 64KB and disk space less than few megabytes.

Both the papers were written before “Quaternion” became standard in animation community and the paper gave some insight into problems associated with rotations in early systems. Catmull’s paper touched upon “SceneGraph” and “Concurrency” issues which are even more relevant today.

Butynyak’s paper provide a deep technical insight into the development of “Key framing” and after reading the paper, I feel that the time is frozen and very little technical ideas have evolved during 1977 -2010. In fact the picture on page 568 is so much similar to some of latest SIGGRAPH paper.

The biggest think to learn from these papers ( as a researcher ) is to explore new ideas and implement them even when we think the current technology and available resource s are limited.

What can we learn from them for the “modern” era?
“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” We don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel. If we understand the evolution of the problems in animation, then perhaps we can also try to understand their solutions. Sometimes it’s too easy to concentrate too much on the details and loose the over all picture.

Some of the problems presented in these papers are things we might now take for granted and then ignore the prior work that made it possible. Animating a hand through a computer may not be a difficult task any longer, and some of what still seems difficult today likely won’t be so difficult at all in another thirty years. So it’s important to learn not just about today’s problems in animation but also ways to solve problems that will come up in ten or twenty years from now. However, there are also things in the papers such as key frames for animation which are still useful for animation today. So some concepts seem like building blocks to larger ideas, while others stick around and are independently useful.

2. Both of these papers are concerned with the creation of tools or new methods of animation, and both are concerned with bettering our ability to produce animation that is realistic. However, I think that now we also concern ourselves with techniques and tools that produce artistic effects. I approve of this branching of efforts because I don’t see a pressing need to improve animation to the point where it is indistinguishable from, say, high resolution video (I believe there is a term for this singularity but cannot remember it). In any event, the invention or refinement of new techniques is at the core of computer animation.

2. It also shows that a lot of modern problems are extensions of older problems. In the paper on cg movies, the primary difficulty they had was modeling the hand. While modeling a hand in today’s world is a trivial task, we’ve simply upped the ante and are trying to model more complex things, and more quickly, giving rise to many of the computer vision techniques that are being used to acquire model data from video. To sum it up, we can learn from these papers that helpful contributions to animation will likely entail improvements that A) make it easier to make models and/or B) make it easier to animate models

Other problems, including the rendering rate, have been solved through algorithms but also pure brute force. The computational power available now to computer animators puts to shame anything the authors had available. Though, interestingly, the hand animation from the first paper, while simple to the modern critic, actually looks rather good. This demonstrates how much of animation depends on motions and positions, and not perfect visual realism.

However, there are problems that are not solved, or not solved satisfactory. Looking at the description of language requirements, we can see that these needs are not that different from modern needs. And some of the points are still areas of active research and development. Our ability to do animated physics and fluids is still mediocre at best. Additionally, what tools we do have are difficult for anyone but trained professionals to use well – indicating how much of the process requires a human operator.

On the other hand, the authors in both papers have done a oddly prophetic job of hitting many major areas that are considered core in graphics and animation today. The concept of skeletal animation is now a primary method of animation. And as the first paper points out, good animation of the hand would not have been possible without realistic shading – something that is continually being researched today.

In total, the major point of these papers is not to learn some rare item of arcane knowledge. It is to understand that the field of computer graphics and animation is not so much revolutionary but evolutionary. Between these two papers, many aspects of modern graphics can be glimpsed in their infant form – still early and unformed, but easily recognizable.

2) What can we learn from them for the “modern” era?
In the modern era, as we strive to make things even more believable and available on a smaller form factor device- we will be faced with newer problem. Sometimes looking back can help one to better understand the root of the problem or take a better approach. Carefully evaluating the work of many researchers over the decades on similar problems will help a lot there. Often one might even realize that an earlier simplistic method is actually much better than the present much ‘cooler’ approach. Apart from that, these papers also give a sense of direction to the computer animation industry as a whole – 4 decades back we were striving to get 2D animation look ‘perfect’ but then the desire to make things realistic has enabled us to move to a higher dimension. So the problems we face now now will in a way decide what movies and games we play in a few years.

What we need to understand from these papers is what has proven the test of time. For example, the MOP language is probably not used by any humans in modern times. But it might form the basis for file formats in standard modeling and animation packages. The methods in the Interactive Skeleton paper look a lot like Texture Mapping Coordinates.

It’s also useful to see which problems where tackled first, what solutions where proposed for them and in what domain they where considered. For example, the Skeleton paper was considering problem solutions in the 2D realm, which at that time would have been where much of that actual Animation work was being done.

Finally, reviewing old papers gives us a chance to look at solutions to problems that my rear their head again. While 3D animation has been the norm for the last 5 years, 2D animation seems to be making a comeback and it might be the case that the solutions to 3D problems might aid in problems that arise in 2D animation.