3D Animation Concepts

1
3D Animation Concepts

• CSC1401
• Steve Cooper

2
Overview

• Creating a new world (slides 5 13)
• Remembering camera position (slides 14 - 22)

3
Traditional Problem Solving in CS

• Read and understand a problem or task
  specification
• Design a solution (develop an algorithm)
• Implement (code)
• Test
• Revise, as needed

4
Problem Solving in Alice

• Read and understand a scenario tell a story,
  play a game, carry out a task.
• A princess has been grounded by her father (a
  wizard) and kept inside the castle. Being a
  rather rebellious princess, she has emailed the
  local dragon taxi service. The dragon will fly to
  the princess and she will climb aboard the dragon
  to escape from the castle to meet some friends
  at the village dance club.

5
Problem Solving in Alice

• Set up the initial scene in a new world
• Learning to set up a scene has a learning curve
  -- play with the scene editor an hour or so!
• The princess example
• Setting up the initial scene

6
Select Template
7
Add Objects

• Click on Add Objects button
• Toggles from code editor to scene editor

8
Scene Editor

• Add objects to the world
• Two options
• Drag and drop
• Click on thumbnail then click on Add Instance
  button

9
Position Orientation

• Objects
• are positioned in 3-D space
• have a sense of orientation
• have six degrees of movement (directions of
  movement)

10
Mouse Control Toolkit

• To reposition objects in the world, use the
  buttons in the mouse control toolkit

11
Pull-down menu methods

• Alternative technique for positioning object and
  subparts during scene setup.

12
Quad View Relative Positioning

13
Empty quad view pane?

• Scroll Zoom controls can be used (usually) to
  reorient the camera view.

14
Controlling the camera

• Not a part of programming concepts instruction
• Only text coverage is Tips Techniques 8
• However, it is helpful because
• Moving the camera during initial scene setup can
  be disorienting
• It is fun to manipulating the camera

15
Using a Dummy Marker during initial scene setup

• Typically used for
• Positioning large and small objects in a scene
• Remembering camera positions for multiple scenes
• Remembering where a good camera position is

16
Example

• Giving the knight a sword

17
Dropping a dummy marker Step 1

• In the scene editor, click on the More controls
  button (right hand side)

18
Dropping a dummy marker Step 2

• Click on the Drop Dummy at Camera button.

19
Rename Dummy Marker

• In the Object Tree, rename the Dummy object to a
  more meaningful name, such as originalPosition
  (not required, but very useful!)

20
Using a dummy marker

• To return the camera to its original position,
  during scene setup
• Pull-down the menu for on the move camera to
  dummy button and select the originalPosition
  dummy marker.

21
Save the world

• This is the world that we will use in continuing
  presentations in this class.

22
Textbook

• More information
• Setting up a scene
• Chapter 1
• Appendix A
• Problem solving in Alice
• Chapter 2, Section 1