Computer Animation Homepage

Paul Solt and Brian Renzenbrink

Assignment 1: Time Based Animation

Here’s a a first look of the basic assignment using time to animate a still object.

Teapot spinning around

Assignment 2: Key Framed Animation

We built a key framing system that could take “key frames” and generate the in-between frames. Once all the frames are generated using interpolation of positions and rotations (quaternions) the frames are played back.

[youtube]ElSP-0ctnIE[/youtube]

You’ll notice that there’s an error with the qutaternion’s flipping 180 degrees and interpolating wrong at two points in the clip. We’re still working to fix the problem.

Unit Testing: A step towards Test Driven Development (TDD)

We’ve incorporated Boost’s Unit Testing framework and are using it to test the functionality of some of the core classes (Vector, Matrix3, Quaternion, Point). I’m trying to experiment with TDD, but it’s been a bit hard to figure out how to test some of the more complex portions of the framework.

AnimationFramework: An Object Oriented Approach to GLUT programming

As a step in refactoring the code and reusing code between assignments the GLUT setup code has been refactored into a framework that can be easily extended through inheritance to provide starting points for new projects. Static functions are passed to the GLUT callback functions, not member functions from the class. I plan on releasing the AnimationFramework as a simple starter for public use.

XML Object Loading

The project uses Boost and Serialization to create XML files that describe objects. However this is very verbose and contatains too much information regarding the structure of the objects. I’m interested in switching from Boost’s serialization framework to TinyXML/TinyXML++ (http://code.google.com/p/ticpp/) In order to deal with the verboseness I create a simple console application to get the needed fields for describing a animation, which is more work than I wanted.

Assignment 3: Pool Simulation with Physics

Here’s a video demonstrating basic Euler integration of the balls position over time.

[youtube]dYSQ2irGTjA[/youtube]

An initial force is applied to one ball in the first frame.

[youtube]vihyZiy97tE[/youtube]

Three balls in the physics scene.

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A more complex scene.