Computer Animation 95

This volume contains research papers that were presented at the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Animation and Simulation which took place at Maastricht, The Nether lands, September 2-3, 1995. A core area within computer graphics, animation is concerned with the computer synthesis of dynamic scenes. The creation of realistic animation based on the simulation of physical and biological phenomena is a unify ing and rapidly evolving research theme. This series of workshops, an activity of the Eurographics Working Group on Animation and Simulation, is an international forum where researchers representing the animation and simulation communities convene to exchange knowledge and experience related to this theme and to physics-based mod elling, human modelling, motion control, visualization, etc. Of keen interest at this sixth workshop were novel animation techniques and animation systems that simulate the dynamics and interactions of physical objects-solid, fluid, and gaseous-as well as the behaviors of living systems such as plants, lower animals, and humans. The workshop continued to promote the confluence of animation and simulation as a leading edge of computer graphics research that is providing animators with sophisticated new algorithms for synthesizing dynamic scenes. The call for extended abstracts for the workshop, issued in February 1995, elicited an enthusiastic response.

Computer Animation '90, the second international workshop on computer animation, was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 25-27, 1990. This book contains invited papers and a selection of research papers submitted to this workshop. The contributions address original research as well as results achieved in a number of fields of computer animation including scientific visualization, human animation, behavioral animation, and motion control.

The contributions to this book address the problem of synthesizing the realistic movement and behaviour of human-like characters, simulated animals, fluids, and other dynamic phenomena. The animation techniques are driven by the goals of efficiency, as required by real-time interactive animations, and quality, as demanded by animations used in feature films. This series of workshops provides a high-quality international forum for the exchange of new ideas related to the themes of character animation, simulation of dynamic natural phenomena, motion capture and analysis, physically-based modeling, behavioral animation, and visualization.

Papers from the April 1995 conference cover such hot topics as computer animation, realtime animation, and virtual and autonomous actors, as well as more traditional aspects like curves, trajectories, animation systems, and tools. There are also new applications in scientific visualization and medical computer graphics. Includes 12 pages of color plates. No index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Computer graphics has been advancing to the level of creating completely new worlds inside computers. Through such computer graphics worlds, we human beings now have far improved insight into wide varieties of real worlds starting from fairly simple but exact worlds of curves and surfaces and reaching to complex human worlds. This volume presents a quite concrete and advanced methods, techniques, modeling and mathematical backgrounds which are indispensable in order to carry out end researches to increase insight through computer graphics.

After nearly half a century of research, the Holy Grail of the ?eld of art- cial intelligence (AI) remains a comprehensive computational model capable of emulating the marvelous abilities of animals, including locomotion, p- ception, behavior, manipulation, learning, and cognition. The comprehensive modeling of higher animals –humans and other primates –remains elusive; However, the research documented in this monograph achieves nothing less than a functional computer model of certain species of lower animals that are by no means trivial in their complexity. Reported herein is the 1996 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award winning work of Xiaoyuan Tu, which she carried out in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Tu presents “arti?cial ?shes”, a rema- able computational model of familiar marine animals in their natural habitat. Originally conceived in the context of computer graphics, Tu’s is to date the only PhD dissertation from this major sub?eld of computer science (and the only thesis from a Canadian university) to win the coveted ACM award.

The 20 research papers in this volume demonstrate novel models and concepts in animation and graphics simulation. Special emphasis is given on innovative approaches to Modelling Human Motion, Models of Collision Detection and Perception, Facial Animation and Communication, Specific Animation Models, Realistic Rendering for Animation, and Behavioral Animation.