FRS 001— Sec. 005— (1 unit) — CRN 73029—T 9:00-9:50am — 75 Kemper (In the basement)
Producing 3D Computer Animation

Instructor: Nelson Max, Department of Applied Science, College of Engineering

Description: Three-D computer animation has been important for many years in special effects, advertising, scientific visualization, and short films, and has more recently entered the animation feature industry, with such films as Finding Nemo, Shrek, Shrek2, and The Incredibles. It normally involves story writing, story boards, voice recording, modeling, animation, lighting, and “post-production” steps like sound effects and editing. This course will concentrate on the modeling, animating, and lighting steps, using a licensed commercial animation package, Maya from Alias. Among the topics to be discussed are piecewise polynomial curves and surfaces, camera motion, 3D object modeling, motion and deformation, hierarchical jointed objects and inverse kinematics, lighting, shading, and texturing. The student will learn how to model and animate 3D objects, and produce a short computer animation of his or her own design.

Format: Class time will be spent mainly on discussing how to use Maya to do these things, and any problems encountered. Students will be expected to use the Maya help and tutorial packages to find information, and to help each other with problems. Required outside activities: at least 3 hours per week, besides the normal class meetings, in the CSIF lab working on assigned animation exercises and the final animation project. The work can also be done at home on your own PC, using the non-licensed Personal Learning Edition of Maya, which may be slow, depending on the capabilities of your own graphics card, and will put an extra PLE logo on top of your animations, to assure that they are not used for commercial purposes. Grading: The grade will be based 40% on the animation exercises and 60% on the final animation project. The purpose of the exercises is to learn how to use the animation system early in the quarter, leaving time for an exciting final project, so grade points will be deducted for lateness. Final projects will be shown to everyone the last day of class. Grading of the final project will of necessity be subjective, since it will be an evaluation of a creative work, but will attempt to account for the effort put into the animation.

About the Instructor: Professor Max works half time teaching in the UC Davis Computer Science Department, and half time doing research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He was director of the NSF supported Topology Films Project in the early 1970's, which produced computer animated educational films on mathematics. He has worked in Japan for 3 and a half years as co-director of two Omnimax (hemisphere screen) stereo films for international expositions, showing the molecular basis of life. His computer animation has won numerous awards. His research interests are in the areas of scientific visualization, volume and flow rendering, computer animation, molecular graphics, realistic computer rendering, including shadow and radiosity effects, and image-based rendering. Recent student research has concerned animation of water flow, image based rendering, hierarchical volume rendering, shadow computations from multi-layered z-buffers, flow visualization, interactive protein structure visualization, contour surface compression, and hardware-texture-assisted radiosity.