Advanced Animation

Course: CS460

Instructor: Thomas Komair

Type: Solo project

Language: C++

Credit: The biped I used for this course is the main character of the game Iona: Coded Will, developed at DigiPen Bilbao during the 2013-2014 academic year.

Overview

The objective of these class was to learn and get a deeper understanding on how computer animation works and some of the tools that are available while creating them.

Skeletal Animation & Skinning

In this project I implemented an skeletal animation system that could reproduce 3D animations using Catmull-Rom, Hermite or Linear interpolations. On top of the animation interpolation I implemented skinning.

Motion Control Along a Curve

The objective of this project was to have a biped walking along a curve, for this I implemented three features:

Parameterized the curve by its arc-length so that the character movement speed was constant along the curve.
Ease-in-out curve to make the character accelerate and decelerate at the starting and ending parts of the curve.
Object orientation using Frenet Frame and Center Of Interest.

Video Legend:

Yellow spheres: Objects moving along the curve (clear to see when is using the arc-length parametrized curve on the top part).
Red spheres: Entries in the parametrization curve.
Yellow line and sphere at the end: Center Of Interest point to which the biped is looking (only visible when using the COI method to find the orientation of the biped).
Graph in the GUI: Ease-in-out time/velocity curve used to determine the speed of the biped at each point.

Inverse Kinematics

For this project I implemented two algorithms, Two Bone in 2D and Cyclic Coordinate Descent (CCD) in 3D.

Particle System Dynamics

This project consisted on implementing a physics simulation by using particle systems and Verlet integration. I used this paper by Thomas Jakobsen as reference.