COSC 3P98 Computer Graphics Project
Kung Fu
Copyright © 2004 Lijia Zhu
URL Link: http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~lz01ac/3P98/projectMain.htm
View the animation (AVI) 11.2 MB
Resolution: 240*180
Total Frames: 817
Frame rate: 24 frames/second
Background:
This animation project is 34 seconds in length. The marvelous oriental Kung Fu is shown to you in this animation project in which two Kung Fu people are fighting.
This short animation story happens in the night with moonlight. Firstly, the Kung Fu monk is standing there practicing Kung Fu. Later, a guy is walking towards the monk and wants to challenge the monk's Kung Fu skill. After the Kung Fu fighting between these two people, the Kung Fu monk wins in the end.
Tools:
Software:
- Poser 4.0: the human character creation and movement.
- Bryce 5.0: the background image.
- AudioEdit Deluxe: convert the mp3 audio file into wav audio file
Hardware:
- AMD Duron 800 MHz
- 128MB RAM
Key Points in the development process:
- Background image:
Originally I planned to import Poser characters into Bryce environment. Later I found that rendering in Bryce is time consuming. So I choose to import Bryce image into the Poser as the background. In order to emphasize the mystery of Kung Fu, I deicde to set the background of this animation as the night with moonlight.
2. Light environment:
In Poser 4, I creates appropriate lights to simulate the light environment that matches the background image imported from Bryce. The light effects and the background image all emphasize the mystery of Chinese Kung Fu.
3. Soundtrack:
Dragon Ball is my favorite cartoon in my childhood. The soundtrack used for the project here is from Dragon Ball. The original audio file I got from the website is in mp3 format, I used AudioEdit Deluxe to convert it into wav audio format. After importing the soundtrack into the Poser, I listened to the audio file for many times. Unlike the common way that importing the soundtrack in the very late stage of the animation design process, I did this in the very early stage. By this way, I can design the character Kung Fu movements best matching the soundtrack rhythm.
4. Character Walking in Poser:
Character walking is hard to implement in the other animation softwares, but Poser's walking designer really helps us a lot in creating the walking path for the character. We can easily create realistic walking movements of the character using Poser.
5. Keyframes and Kung Fu poses:
Firstly, I use keyframes in every 24 frames to let the system automatically generates the frames in between. In these key frames, i designed several drastic and cool Kung Fu poses for the two characters as screen shots below. In this step, the Poser library does assist me a lot. Next, in order to display the sophisticated Kung Fu movements, I did minor adjustment in almost all in-between frames. Marvelous Kung Fu poses play the key role in my project, hence i devote much efforts in designing marvelous Kung Fu poses in this step.
6. Camera movement:
Different camera positions can give the viewer different senses of the same character pose. In the following two screen shots, actually the characters do not change their pose, but the viewer can enjoy the same marvelous pose from the different point of view. The combination of the camera movement and the character movement contributes to the drastic and cool animation results.
Conclusion:
- This animation project is interesting. I learned fundamental knowledge for creating the animation production from this project. The notion of key frame is very helpful to generate the in-between animation frames. It really saves our time to develop the animation production. However, you must do minor adjustment in the intermediate frames in order to get more sophisticated results and to reduce the impractical character pose errors in the intermediate frames.
- The time that needs to render the animation product is an important issue while choosing suitable animation software. Poser is a very powerful animation software for human character animtion. The hardware requirement for using Poser is not so high compared to the other softwares. Frankly speaking, I learned Bryce ahead of Poser. Bryce is a good animation software to simulate the nature. However, I find that it is time consuming to render even a simple natural scenery in Bryce. Due to the tight due date, I choose Poser as the main animation software in this project. To meet the deadline is an important issue in IT industry. So does our project.
- To create more professional animation product, we should choose more powerful animation softwares such as 3D MAX, MAYA etc. But the learning curve to learn those softwares is steep. More powerful software normally means more time to learn it. Also the computer hardware requirements for those softwares are high. Although it is time consuming to use those softwares in our project, it is widely to use them in the animation industry. Some movies even apply those powerful softwares to create special marvelous effects. (e.g. Titantic; Matrix etc) For those people who are interested in devoting themselves in the brilliant animation industry, it is very useful to learn more powerful animation softwares in the future.
COSC 3P98 is really an interesting computer graphics course. We really had a lot of fun in taking this course. All three assignments and project do bring us happiness. In my opinion, creativity and enthusiasm play the key role in this course. Once you have them, taking the course COSC 3P98 is just the journey full of fun. : )
Copyright © 2004 Lijia Zhu