Simulation of plasma, or animation of events detected by photon detectors in common usage in physics labs everywhere ( in conjunction with lasers and atomic colliders) would probably be helpful to physicists; they do get an idea of what is going on inside via LabView or printouts, but computer animations are obviously cooler.

each of these leads to a great set of potential topics.
#2 – kinnect to BVH isn’t so straightforward since you’ll need to deal with the noise issues to get decent results
#4 – there’s a bunch of the psychology, but it would be nice to create animations that either show stuff off well, or experiment as to whether good animation leads to better learning
#5/#6 getting hand drawn looks is a big topic that is quite far along.
using model sheets, not something that happens much
(of course, its hard to get our hands on many model sheets)

How can you explain to a child ( or for that matter even adult) that it is possible to turn a sphere inside out without puncturing it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_w4HYXuo9M
or produce elegant universe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO2vfYNaIbk

In fact, we spent too much time on Brownian motion of human beings in the class than many other types of animations, which are impossible to produce without computers.

I like cartoon physics – in some ways, it can be easier than real physics. But in other ways its harder since it is about “intent” – it isn’t just following the rules of the world – its dynamically changing the rules of the world to tell a story.

I guess the main issue is where to start, and what to do in a short amount of time. Also, to warn you, unlike stuff we’ve been doing in class, that stuff actually requires learning some math.

One thought is to talk to Eftychios and see if he has any good ideas for simple, short term projects. (that don’t require taking his class first)

The cartoon physics thing sounds like a really neat idea.

Also, it’d be interesting to see how perception can be involved the construction of animations (i.e. in procedural content generation or in blending or facial animation) but I have no good sense of how well this has been covered in the literature. I know there were a few facial animation topics discussed at APGV last year, but that’s all I can think of right now.

As with many others in the class, I’d like to do something with 2D character animation. The idea I’m considering is to use a motion with a 3-D model to generate ‘sprite animations’ from orthographic projections. In other words, an artist would create a model + animation and specify a desired projection; then the tool would sample the animation from this perspective and generate X amount of images (putting them on a sprite animation grid/texture).

Ideally, I’d like to use the results from this to make a controllable ‘sprite pawn’ in the Unreal Engine with the intent to streamline production of 2D + 3D games.

Realistically though, I might need to settle for a reading-based project focused on 2D animation due to plethoras of programming I have for other classes.

I think this is a very cool idea… I think sketch based animations are cool in general. I thought you were implementing some sort of sketch based techniques in project 1, hope that it coming along well too.

The reversed approach sounds interesting but how difficult is to actually get to work. I can definitely think of some cool application once you get it working. Eg: have collection of drawings by kids and using those sketches to create a 3D animation or using photos as input (might be getting more towards the Computer vision there though)