University of Utah School of Computing
CS 5967/6967:
Character Animation
INSTRUCTOR:    Adam Bargteil (Office hours: By appointment, WEB 2666)
WEB PAGE: http://www.eng.utah.edu/~cs6967/
TIME: M/W 1:25-2:45
PLACE:     WEB 122
UNITS: 3
COURSE OVERVIEW:
Characters are one of the most important components of films and video games. Creating natural looking motion for virtual characters is an area of very active research in the computer animation and graphics communities. This course will explore the problem of animating characters and a variety of the approaches that have been proposed. This course will be very technical in nature and will involve several programming assignments.

TOPICS TO BE COVERED:

  • Inverse Kinematics
  • Motion Editing, Warping, Retargeting, and Interpolation
  • Motion Graphs
  • Graph Search
  • Optimization
  • Crowds
  • Physically Based Character Simulation
  • Cages
  • Skinning
  • Interfaces for Animation
  • PREREQUISITES:
    Interest and enthusiasm are the most important prerequisites. Programming experience and basic familiarity with linear algebra and calculus is assumed. Some background in computer graphics is helpful.
    PROGRAMMING ASSIGNMENTS: Your programming assignments should produce two final products: a short video and a short paper. The video should demonstrate your system and the paper should describe what you've done.
    Late Policy: You have five late days to be used over the semester. These should provide sufficient flexibility to handle other project deadlines. After using these days, there will be a 10%/day late penalty.

    Assignment Due Date Description
    Inverse Kinematics Sep. 19, 2011     Description
    Motion Editing or Graphs     Oct. 24, 2011 Coming Soon
    Final Project Dec. 15, 2011
    TEXT:
    There is no text covering the topics in this course and no text is required. Some topics are covered in Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques by Rick Parent. Other useful resources can be found in the schedule below.
    CLASS SCHEDULE (subject to change)

    Date Topic Reading
    08/22/11
    Introduction
    08/24/11
    Cancelled
    08/29/11
    Inverse Kinematics
    08/31/11
    Motion Editing
    Motion Warping
    Andrew Witkin and Zoran Popovic
    Motion Editing with Spacetime Constraints
    Michael Gleicher
    09/05/11
    Labor Day. No Classes.
    09/07/11
    Motion Retargeting
    Retargetting Motion to New Characters
    Michael Gleicher
    Animating Non-Human Characters using Human Motion Capture Data
    Katsu Yamane, Yuka Ariki, and Jessica Hodgins
    09/12/11
    Motion Capture & Motion Graphs
    Motion Graphs
    Lucas Kovar, Michael Gleicher, Fred Pighin
    Interactive Motion Generation from Examples
    Okan Arikan & David Forsyth
    Interactive Control of Avatars Animated with Human Motion Data
    Jehee Lee, Jinxiang Chai, Paul S. A. Reitsma, Jessica K. Hodgins, and Nancy S. Pollard
    09/14/11
    Motion Graphs & Transitions
    Efficient Generation of Motion Transitions using Spacetime Constraints
    Charles Rose, Brian Guenter, Bobby Bodenheimer, Michael F. Cohen
    Quick Transitions With Cached Multi-way Blends
    Leslie Ikemoto, Okan Arikan, David Forsyth
    09/19/11
    Project 1 Presentations
    09/21/11
    Time-Warping
    Physics-Based Motion Retiming (Movies)
    James McCann, Nancy S. Pollard, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa
    Guided Time Warping for Motion Editing
    Eugene Hsu, Marco da Silva, Jovan Popovic
    09/26/11
    Interpolating Motion
    Analyzing the Physical Correctness of Interpolated Human Motion
    Alla Safonova and Jessica Hodgins
    Construction and optimal search of interpolated motion graphs
    Alla Safonova and Jessica K. Hodgins
    Achieving Good Connectivity in Motion Graphs
    Liming Zhao & Alla Safonova
    09/28/11
    Dimensionality
    Synthesizing Physically Realistic Human Motion in Low-Dimensional, Behavior-Specific Spaces
    Alla Safonova, Jessica K. Hodgins, Nancy S. Pollard
    Compression of Motion Capture Databases
    Okan Arikan
    10/03/11
    Optimization-Based Synthesis
    Learning Physics-based Motion Style with Nonlinear Inverse Optimization
    Karen Liu, Aaron Hertzmann, Zoran Popovic
    Optimization-based Interactive Motion Synthesis
    Sumit Jain, Yuting Ye, C. Karen Liu
    10/05/11
    Catchup
    10/10/11
    Fall Break. No Classes.
    10/12/11
    Fall Break. No Classes.
    10/17/11
    Crowds
    Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters
    Craig W. Reynolds
    Controlling Individual Agents in High-Density Crowd Simulation (Movie)
    Nuria Pelechano, Jan M. Allbeck, Norman Badler
    10/19/11
    Crowds
    Continuum Crowds
    Adrien Treuille, Seth Cooper, Zoran Popovic
    Aggregate Dynamics for Dense Crowd Simulation
    Rahul Narain, Abhinav Golas, Sean Curtis, Ming Lin
    10/24/11
    Project 2 Presentations
    10/26/11
    Simulated Characters
    Animating Human Athletics
    Jessica K. Hodgins, Wayne L. Wooten, David C. Brogan, James F. O'Brien
    Dynamic Response for Motion Capture Animation
    Victor Zordan, Bill Chiu, Anna Majkowska, Matthew Fast
    10/31/11
    Simulated Characters
    SIMBICON: Simple Biped Locomotion Control
    Kangkang Yin, Kevin Loken, Michiel van de Panne
    Simulating Biped Behaviors from Human Motion Data
    Kwang Won Sok, Manmyung Kim, Jehee Lee
    11/01/11
    Simulated Characters
    Multiobjective Control with Frictional Contacts
    Yeuhi Abe, Marco da Silva, Jovan Popovic
    Momentum Control for Balance
    Adriano Macchietto, Victor Zordan, Christian R. Shelton
    To be presented by James King
    11/07/11
    Cages
    Interactive Skeleton-Driven Dynamic Deformations
    Steve Capell, Seth Green, Brian Curless Tom Duchamp, Zoran Popovic
    To be presented by Stephen Ward
    Mean Value Coordinates for Closed Triangular Meshes
    Tao Ju, Scott Schaefer, Joe Warren
    11/09/11
    Cages
    Harmonic Coordinates for Character Articulation
    Pushkar Joshi, Mark Meyer, Tony DeRose, Brian Green, Tom Sanocki
    To be presented by Joseph Perenia
    Green Coordinates
    Yaron Lipman, David Levin, Daniel Cohen-Or
    11/14/11
    Skinning
    Pose Space Deformation
    J.P. Lewis, Matt Cordner, and Nickson Fong
    To be presented by Joanita
    Building Efficient, Accurate Character Skins from Examples
    Alex Mohr and Michael Gleicher
    To be presented by Hema Bhatia
    11/16/11
    Skinning
    Real-Time Enveloping with Rotational Regression
    Robert Y. Wang, Kari Pulli, Jovan Popovic
    Example-based Dynamic Skinning in Real Time
    Xiaohan Shi, Kun Zhou, Yiying Tong, Mathieu Desbrun, Hujun Bao, Baining Guo
    To be presented by Stephen Lu
    11/21/11
    Skinning
    Reusable Skinning Templates Using Cage-based Deformations
    Tao Ju, Qian-Yi Zhou, Michiel van de Panne, Daniel Cohen-Or, Ulrich Neumann
    To be presented by Atul Rungta
    Capturing and Animating Skin Deformation in Human Motion
    Sang Il Park, Jessica K. Hodgins
    To be presented by Liang He
    11/25/11
    Thanksgiving: No Class
    11/28/11
    Rigging
    Outside-In Anatomy Based Character Rigging
    Michael Pratscher, Patrick Coleman, Joe Laszlo, and Karan Singh
    To be presented by Thong Nguyen
    Automatic Rigging and Animation of 3D Characters
    Ilya Baran & Jovan Popovic
    To be presented by Ryan McAlister
    11/30/11
    Interfaces
    Action Capture with Accelerometers
    Ronit Slyper and Jessica K. Hodgins
    To be presented by Nick Rasband
    Human Motion Reconstruction from Force Sensors
    Sehoon Ha, Yunfei Bai, and C. Karen Liu
    12/05/11
    Features
    Efficient Content-Based Retrieval of Motion Capture Data
    Sehoon Ha, Yunfei Bai, and C. Karen Liu
    12/07/11
    Final Exam
    12/15/11
    1:00-3:00
    Final Project Presentations
    METHOD OF EVALUATION:
    Course Number 5967      6967     
    Programming Assignments      40% 30%
    Final Project 40% 40%
    Paper Presentations 0% 15%
    Final Exam 20% 15%