Bathroom Partiee!!TEAM 14Kae-Chy ChenJane HuangRichard Su Abstract"Bathroom Partiee" is a short animation depicting common objects in a bathroom come alive onemysterious night. The animation is approximately 5 minutes long. We used the 3D rendering packageAlias|Wavefront to create the objects as well as the animation. IntroductionWe created this story in a form of an animation to entertain our audience. We hope viewers will be ableto identify with the story’s moods and themes as well as each character’s personalities. This project is an extension of assignment 3 and 4 where we experimented with object creation andscene modeling. Given a longer length of time to complete this project and having been endowed withmore sophisticated tools, we aimed to create a piece that tries to capture some of the art and complexityin computer graphics animations featured in films and television commercials. GoalsThe overall goal of this project, at an abstract level, has been to produce a smooth and interestinganimation using the accessible resources and acquired knowledge. In turn, this goal is outlined bymutiple concrete objectives; the group aimed at understanding and experiencing the comprehensiveprocess in animation-creation, becoming familiar with the software package, Alias|Wavefront, andimproving our abilities to determine fair trade-offs. In accordance with learning the process to creating a successful animation, the group faced a plethora ofnew challenges. The group has to create an unanimously-agreed intriguing storyboard, and must persistto implement that storyboard with little deviation. In order to effectively convey the storyboard and toattempt at achieving special effects, specific skills of motion-path definition, consistent lightingenvironment, and specific camera arrangements have been targetted goals. In particular, as ourstoryboard consisted of small animated objects in a relatively large room, the task of creating an excitingand busy party atmosphere becomes heavily dependent on the smoothness of camera location andperspective animation. Moreover, as the proposed setting is the night-time, the overall usage of lightingis tricky, such that objects can be expressively displayed without violating the overall nightenviornment. Finally, as the story required the coming-to-life of bathroom objects, the group mustdetermine a healthful level of realness that does not conflict with animation. Conversely, the specificanimations should express the personalities of the each objects, without compromising their apparances;with respect to realistic modelling, our objects will display emotion with only semantic deformation, andnot contrived facial expressions or appendages. On the other hand, our goals with Alias|Wavefront are broad and dynamic. We wish to familiarlizeourselves with the software such that animation effects are captured with minimal frustration and grief.We strived at maximizing the utility of the package by exploring various features in the package. And aswe were able to further identify Alias tools and needs of our storyboard, we aimed at customizedexpertise in Alias’s specific texture-mapping approaches, motion-path definitions, curvature and pivotmanagement, object deformation techiniques, lighting and camera arrangements, and other animationtools. Finally, the project inherently supplied an abundance of trade-off decision, the most frequented beingthat between the "coolness" and the practicalness, and between the frustration level and a highlysophisticated final result. We began by making realistic proposals and projecting practical milestonesand concrete sub-goals. We also made provisions of fallback plans which, hopefully, may reducedifficulty more than quality. Lastly, and most currently, we remain in the battle to make this final projecta enjoyable experience that is not hazardous to our health. AchievementsIn the end, our group has achieved most of the goals we had at the beginning of the project. We arecomfortably familiar with the Alias|Wavefront environment. In creating our animation, we learned the following techniques that are often used in computeranimation:boolean operations to create new objects. deformation to creat realitic movements for the objects. texture mapping to create labels for our objects. animation using action windows to manipulate motion paths and keyframing. working with camera perspectives. shading objects to create colors and various surfaces in the scene. working with lighting. We have also achieved in making a smooth animation through the consistent lighting and camera work.Our final animation follows most of our storyboard. However, because of the time constraints and ourmistake of spending a good portion of the month working on this project in a depth-first approachinstead of breath-first approach as suggested by both the TA and the instructor. We realized that unlesswe changed our method of creating this animation, our final animation will not be able to be completed.In the end, we did resort to cutting out quite a few scenes because of the complexity of the scenes. Forexample, in our original storyboard, we had a scene in which objects would jump into the bath tub filledwith water and thus create a splash. At the advice of the TA, we cut out the scene because we did nothave enough time to create realistic looking splash. We succeeded in giving some personality to the objects with out the use of facial expressions. This wasdone by object movements in reaction to interactions with the environment and other objects. Themovements of the objects are created using both traditional methods of translating and rotating theobjects as well as deformation. Our original plan was to explore inverse kinematics for the deformation; however, we learned that IKmodeling was not necessary for our objects and that curve deformation would work just as well.However, we ran into quite a few Alias specific problems when we were working with grouping objectstogether. Alias always placed the grouped objects’ pivot at the origin. This caused several difficultieswhen we tried to do transformations and deformations to the objects. However, after much headache andtesting, we were able to create believable deformations. While creating the animation, we had to make some decisions for tradeoffs. Because rendering in Aliastakes a long time, we had to tradeoff details on the objects for faster rendering time. This meant we hadto change how close we want the
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