Computer Animation as a Medium Used for Education and for Entertainment

Computer Animation can be used for educational interdisciplinary presentations and also for visualization as an ideal means to teach any discipline that could use visual presentation. Everyone needs visualization because it is the most natural way in which people view the world. It represents an excellent choice for presentation – visual presentation in studying and teaching, as well as in information transfer, as is reflected in a well-known saying "a picture is worth a thousand words".

The aim of this lecture is to present Computer Animation as a useful tool for creating educational animations in the field of medicine. I will present a couple of educational animations we created over the last two years.

The first one is named "Educational 3D animation according to Vejnovic modification of the Cesarean section technique". In the first presentation I will show all the necessary techniques that we use in the process of 3D Computer Animation creating, and the animation that we made for the education of medical doctors (in this case gynecologists) and their virtual training. We made a 3D Computer Animation according to professor Vejnovic modification of the Cesarean section technique.

The second educational animation is named "Educational 3D animations as a guide to a set of exercises for correcting bad posture in childhood". We created a set of 17 exercises for the purpose of its application in the treatment of poor posture in children age 8-12. These animations are made in cooperation with medical doctors who are specialist in the field of Physiatry. The second topic of the presentation is Computer Animation as a medium used for Entertainment. I will present our latest 3D short animation "Head is not Dead" which has just been finished. The film was made by our New Silhouette Studio and is our second (entertainment) film, following Alea Iacta Est (The Die is Cast) our first film, see http://www.racunarska-grafika.com/index.php/galerija or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-84_fXUmodI&t=22s I will also present NS Studio pipeline for 3D Computer Animation short film creating. Professor PhD Ratko Obradovic Novi Sad, 25th June 2017. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ratko_Obradovic

DreamWorks Animation (American Studio) Pipeline consist from 16 steps (Departments) and 2700 employees, and total income two billions $ (in 2015.):

1. Story (Script) 2. Editorial (Director, Producer) 3. Art Department 4. Modeling 5. Rigging 6. Surfacing 7. Rough Layout - previzuelizacija 8. Final Layout 9. Animation 10. Crowds (masovne scene) 11. Character FX (simulacija odeće, dinamika kose, simulacija krzna) 12. FX (eksplozije, rušenja, otisci stopala u snegu ili pesku, karakter koji menja boju ili oblik,

vatra, dim, ) 13. Matte Painting (nebo, oblaci, planine, ) 14. Lighting 15. Image Finaling (otklanjanje grešaka sa pojedinih rendera) 16. Sound Design

NS Studio pipeline for 3D Computer Animation short film creating

New Silhouette Studio is founded in 2011. by Ratko Obradovic (producer), Božidar Knežević (Scriptwriter and Director) and Miloš Vujanović (Art director)

Today, NS Studio has 10 members, which created second film "Head is not Dead"

There are three main part in creating animation:

Preproduction

Production

Postproduction

Preproduction

SCRIPT (manuscript) Could be used for Theatre, Film, Commercials, music Festivals... Synopsis

"a brief summary or general survey of something"

HEAD'S NOT DEAD is a classic comic styled story about struggle between good and evil: on one side we have the bully which threatens a defenseless creature, and on another side a kind of a superhero who protects the victim of violence and win the evil - but not by using muscle and super powers than using of science and knowledge.

Storyboard

There are 43 Storyboard pages in this case.

What is Storyboard?

Something that is similar to Strip: "Alan Ford", "Captain America".... but it is not a Strip!

Consist from pictures, usually drawn by hand (on paper or on graphical board)

There are short textual explanations about Character moving, about Camera moving....

We are using Synthetic Camera, which is camera that program contains.

Concept Art

Concept art is a form of illustration used to translate an idea for use in films, video games, animation, comic books... or other media before it is put into the final product. Concept art is also referred to as visual development and/or concept design. This term can also be applied to fashion, architectural and industrial design.

PHoToN (elementary particle)

M.Yao (cat sound, Yao is Chinese Surname)

B.Attackovich (Attack+ leg (batak in Serbian)+ ...ovich is usually Serbian surname end)

Characters Design

Drawn by Art Department (Artists), according to a Script, and Concept Art, in agreement/cooperation with Director, Art Director and Producer.

Character should follow the story.

Character should be technically feasible! What does it mean? We wish to design character which are not too complex for computer's modeling.

We must create Character in some 3D software (3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender...), We should create Character Geometry, we are using a Mesh as a surface representation.

Production

Digital Sculpting - ZBrush

Front view

Side view

Show Turn around (360 degree) videos!

Unwrapping

Position of Seams are important! We are manually creating Seams: If I get bad seams, the result is bad !

M.Yao

developed in plane

PHoToN

PHoToN developed in plane

B.Attackovich

B.Attackovich in plane

Texturing and Character Painting

Surface finish, also known as surface texture or surface topography, is the nature of a surface as defined by the three characteristics of lay, surface roughness and waviness. It comprises the small local deviations of a surface from the perfectly flat ideal (a true plane).

Surface roughness often shortened to roughness, is a component of surface texture. It is quantified by the deviations in the direction of the normal vector of a real surface from its ideal form. If these deviations are large, the surface is rough; if they are small, the surface is smooth.

Character Painting = coloring

Rigging

reminder: Show rigging test 1 and 2!

Skeletal animation is a technique in Computer Animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called the skeleton or rig) used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh. While this technique is often used to animate humans or more generally for organic modeling, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object — a door, a spoon, a building, or a galaxy....

Animation

Film is divided into scenes.

Cadre: The basic unit of the film, the smallest dynamic unit, the part between two prefabricated Compounds (cuts)

Scene: A series of Cadres whose action takes place in one place (location) in a particular one time

Sequence: Ideally and logically grouped Scenes

• Computer animation, or CGI animation, is the process used for generating animated images. The more general term Computer-Generated Imaginery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to the moving images. Modern Computer Animation usually uses 3D Computer Graphics, although 2D Computer Graphics are still used for stylistic, low bandwidth, and faster Real-time renderings.

• To create the illusion of movement, an image is displayed on the Computer Monitor and repeatedly replaced by a new image that is similar to it, but advanced slightly in time (usually at a rate of 24 or 30 frames/second). This technique is identical to how the illusion of movement is achieved with television and motion pictures.

• For 3D animations, objects (models) are built on the computer monitor (modeled) and 3D figures are rigged with a virtual skeleton. For 2D figure animations, separate objects (illustrations) and separate transparent layers are used with or without that virtual skeleton. Then the limbs, eyes, mouth, clothes, etc. of the figure are moved by the animator on key frames. Finally, the animation is rendered.

• For 3D animations, all frames must be rendered after the modeling is complete.

VFX - Visual Effects

visual effects (abbreviated VFX) are the processes by which imagery is created or manipulated outside the context of a live action shot.

Visual effects using CGI have recently become accessible to the independent filmmaker with the introduction of affordable and easy-to-use animation and compositing software.

We are using 3D Studio Max for VFX, for particle creating cigarette smoke, and After Effects for compositing.

Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene.

Rendering

Rendering is the process of generating an image from a 2D or 3D model (or models in what collectively could be called a scene file) by means of computer programs. Also, the results of such a model can be called a rendering. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting and shading information as a description of the virtual scene. The data contained in the scene file is then passed to a rendering program to be processed and output to a digital image or raster graphics image file.