Animation
From Visualization Sp06
Lecture on Apr 11, 2006
Readings
- Animation: Can it facilitate? Tversky, Morrison and Betrancourt. (pdf)
- On creating animated presentations. Zongker and Salesin. (html)
- Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to Computer Animation. Lasseter (acm)
Optional Readings
- Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface. Chang and Ungar. (pdf)
- Representing motion in a static image: Constraints and parallels in art, science, and popular culture. Cutting. (pdf)
Contents |
Bryan - Apr 11, 2006 09:48:15 am
I remember being very impressed with UW's presentations at SIGGRAPH '03 because of their use of slithy. I talked to Doug about it and I was excited to try it out, and somewhat disappointed when it was more complex (high threshold, I guess) than I had hoped. Since then, I've made many presentations (mostly with Apple's Keynote software) that lacked most of the wonderful animation and flexibility of slithy. Sometimes I consider using it, but I'm always hesitant to code a presentation, restrict its portability, etc.
Later versions of Microsoft Powerpoint seem to have gained many of the animation capabilities of slithy (though admittedly not as elegantly executed as with OpenGL). I've seen a lot of abuse of these features--it seems like they provide all the rope you need to hang yourself. Maybe the slithy model is appropriate for highly-polished, highly-practiced presentations but has too high an overhead of more quickly prepared ones.
Brien - Apr 15, 2006 03:13:31 pm
Getting curves/inbetweens to convey an intended feeling in keyframe animation seems like an interesting art. I especially like the trick to tighten a spline mentioned on page 7 of John Lasseter's paper. The paper "Interpolating Splines with Local Tension, Continuity, and Bias Control" by Doris Kochanek (referenced from Lasseter's) is a great treatment of how to parameterize the feeling of a curve -- it matches mathematics with design principles. This paper was back in '84 -- I wonder what has been done on the subject more recently.
Also, some post-presentation thoughts to Mehershad, if you're reading this: - given that earthquake data are hard to get, you could maybe try to use soil data to perform your spatial interpolation, if soil data are any easier to get - I agree with what Bryan mentioned, that, for each individual station, interpolating between the earthquake values (i.e. filling in a best guess, be it linear or whatever) would enhance the animation by making it smoother (could push it beyond 1fps). I understood that you have a stream of values coming in from each station ... if not, I guess it would be harder.
Sharena - Apr 18, 2006 01:07:26 pm
I am going to be an in intern in MS Powerpoint and probably in the Animations group this summer, so it is interesting to learn about another presentation platform for animations. And I'd like to try out Slithy now and see how it works and see if that animation really helps understand a presentation.
Raymond - Apr 18, 2006 01:25:50 pm
It thought it was really interesting to watch the two triangles and circles move around and our ability to symbolize the shapes to convey a story. It goes to show how powerful the mind is. Also, does anyone have a link to Slithy? I would like to check it out.
Gwyu - Apr 18, 2006 07:58:13 pm
Going with Raymond's point about the shapes movie, some further work with similiar films has been done in cognitive psychology by Martin and Tversky about segmenting ambiguous events. They find that playing a movies about abstract shapes (similar to the Heider and Simmel "chase" film) both forward and backward produce differing interpretations and different event segmentations. Cognitive psychology work on event segmentation might also be useful in the production of diagrammatic depiction of processes, and seems to relate to other work on finding natural breakpoints in actions.
Yi-Tao - May 09, 2006 10:40:38 am
Has anyone managed to get the samples for slithy to work? I ran the batch file but the window just closed without doing anything.
I agree with Bryan, the overhead for slithy is far too high. For most people, complex animations in presentations are not needed. In fact, I've seen presentations that are ruined because of bad animations because people use animations to impress rather than convey information.
I noticed that most of the principles from cartoon rely on exaggeration (e.g., unrealistic poses or events). They don't seem useful if the fast but realistic animations. For example, some of the fight scenes in Advent Children were so fast I had to pause to catch everything.
Mattkam - May 10, 2006 04:36:59 pm
The discussion on cognitive psychology by Gwyu and Yi-Tao's observation that cartoons rely on exaggeration make me think about the book "Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations" by the late Russian psychologist Alexander Luria (which incidentally is a major source of inspiration for my class project). In this book, Luria shows how culture has a major influence on processes on perception, which traditional psychologists believe to be physiological in its basis.
My guess is that for animation to be used effectively, it must appeal to cultural connotations in the audience. More importantly, the animation technique used has to be appropriate to the situation at hand. For instance, using exaggeration in animation during corporate presentations might be misconstrued as a lack of professionalism.
