What A Cat Can Do ? 6.837 Team 31 Final Project Report Fig.1 Cat modeled by 3D MAXAbstract"What A Cat can Do ?" is a project combines a short animation of one day life of a catmainly produced by 3D Studio MAX with a prototype of real-time 3D interactive userinterface which simulates some character behaviors driven from user’s input via keyboard.Some music effects are added into the interface. The real-time rendering and music playbackare generated by Microsoft’s Direct3D and DirectSound engine. IntroductionDigital Creature has become a more and more considered topic of future research direction.By means of faster PC 3D accelerators and more sophisticated graphic development enginesprovided by various companies, the basically unfeasible development of real-time, quality,3D virtual environment on PC platform has become possible recently. There are alreadysome fascinating demonstrations or products on the market such as real time motion capture,real time motion simulation performed on powerful workstation level machines. However,due to speed issue, most PC level real time 3D computer games or applications are stillconfined to simple models with less polygon numbers or reduced texture mappings andcolors. As bandwidth and CPU capability problems will gradually decrease. The line betweenpersonal computers and workstation class machines is rapidly disappearing. More and moremultimedia enriched products emerge to the market, as a result, users will become morecritical toward the overall graphic quality and performance of an application. The motivation of this project divides into two directions: one, to familiar with 3D modelingtools in order to have the ability of producing well designed models or animation for standalone applications or 3D based game spirits and scenes. Two, to explore the possibility ofgenerating real time 3D simulations using pre-designed objects and animation with differentgraphic APIs, to find out what can be done at current stage and what can’t.There are severalAPIs developed to complete 3D rendering pipeline (light, transformation, rotation, etc.)which can access to the hardware acceleration capabilities available on different performingplatforms. As hardware and software environment mature, 3D real time simulatedapplications with high resolution, accurate texture mapped, colored characters and sceneswill definitely become the main stream in many aspects. This project is a first step for futurepossibilities as well as a milestone to demonstrate techniques learned in 6.837 lecturesthrough out this semester. GoalsThe goal of this project is to explore 3D character animation as well as the procedure andtechnique needed to complete a 3D based real time rendering application.( a virtualenvironment, a game, or graphic demonstration tools ) Within the limited time frame, wehope to gain an overall understanding of the mechanism by implementing a simple prototypeof 3D real-time rendering interface on PC and devote also enough time for producing a short3D character animation. At the same time, we want to find proper tool (or tools) to exportthe animation and modeling works into controllable file format and achieve some interactivecontrols using graphic APIs. Something we want to learn and achieve from this project:Familiar with 3D modeling tools. Build enough understanding towardnecessary 3D animation skills. Build a good story line. Build an immersive 3D character and scenes.Produce a short animation with complete story line and sound effect.Learn digital video formats and nonlinear editing techniques. Export some animation clips or 3D modeled objects into controllable fileformats.Find a suitable graphic API which can handle animated file with reasonablecomplexity.Programming user input interface and link it with proper character motionsimulation. Add some sound effects to the interface. Achieve Real-time rendering with reasonable complexity if time permits. AchievementsA.Character Animation PartBeing able to produce one short character animation isone of the two major goals of this project. The first two tothree weeks were used to familiar with the availablemodeling tools, go through some examples provided bythe reference books listed in the last part of this report.Concerned about the learning curve with available time, Ichose 3D Studio MAX R2.5 as the main modeling toolinstead of more powerful modeling software - Alias onAthena SGI machines. Together with 3D Studio MAXR2.5, I also use Metacreation’s character modeling toolPoser 4, Scene modeler Bryce 4, as helpers for somebehavior animation assessment and outdoor scenebuilding. As for detailed picture editing, I used Photoshopas main graphic edit tool. After rendering out from 3DMAX, the avi files of clips were put together with soundeffects and edited using nonlinear video editing toolAdobe Premiere. Major efforts and difficulties can bedivided by the followings: Animation storyboardThe story idea was firstly sketched out as Fig.2. Itlays out what happens in one day for a cat’s life.The animation will serve as the main backgroundstory as most of the current games and link outsome dance animation, different behavior modelingwhich can be exported into controllable file formatfor the 3D real time rendering engine.Fig.2 Main storyboard sketch 3D character modeling Character modeling is one of the hardest but funniest parts of3D modeling. I’ve done some basic character modeling usingMetacreation’s character tool Poser. Poser’s pre-designedcharacter models have well built skeleton, Inverse KinematicsSetting and joint limitation setting which is very easy toproduce character animation with reasonable familiarity to thesoftware. However, it also limits some imagination and you canonly control part of the existing models. 3D Studio MAX is apowerful modeling tool. With it’s plug-in Character Studio, wecan also produce compelling character animation with a lotease. Unfortunately, I still haven’t got access to this powerfultool until writing this report. Therefore, I decided to doeverything from scratch and get myself a chance to learn theessence of Hierarchy and IK setting. Some difficulties occurredalone the way:Correct geometry design- the cat model actually comefrom the snoopy model designed for assignment 3. Ichanged the head part the modified body, arm, legs bytaper, rescale, rotate little by little.Here is the catevolution course in Fig.3. The whole model takes abouttwo whole day’s work evolving
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