Abstract

Perceiving the skin move affected by underlying muscles and flesh is an important part of selling the believability of an animated cgi creature to an audience. Current simulation techniques are slow to run and rely on a programmers ability to implement a multi-spring driven tetrahedral mesh to deform the creatures skin. Earlier techniques such as those used in Jurassic Park (1993) of hand animating isolated parts are still in use today but require a lot of animation hours.This research led to a solution that delivers 5 screen hours of simulations with few resources, i.e. with no programmers and no animators. I needed to design and implement a solution that solely used the off-the-shelf authoring tool of the client, Softimage XSI.I designed a system that was based on my earlier research of a shape based Facial Action Coding [Ekmann 1977] user interface for animators. This system enabled multiple 3D shape targets to be driven by a single 2D slider. The animator would hand keyframe each slider to portray a particular emotion or facial expression. A calf muscle when put under force such as a foot stomp will oscillate in all 3-axis. I created a series of six shape targets based on the extremes of each movement (up, down, in, out, and side to side).Softimage XSI has a simple and fast dynamics system built in. I created a simple single point oscillating spring and attached it to the leg of the creature and hooked it's transform into each shape. The result was an extremely realistic but affordable muscle system that increased the sustainability of the studio.reorder -problem, method, solution. how effectively shared