Syllabus
and
Reading List



Background Readings

These are really great books to have. While readings will be handed out in class, there are several books which I think you will find useful both for the course and just as a general reference.

  • Thomas, F and O. Johnson The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. 1981 Hyperion Press New York
  • Watt, A. and M. Watt. Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques: Theory and Practice. 1992 Addision Wesley.
  • Maestri, G. Digital Character Animation. 1996. New Riders Publishing

    • Here are some other books that have useful stuff in them depending on your interest

  • Badler, N. B. Barsky and D. Zeltzer. Making Them Move: Mechanics, Control and Animation of Articulated Figures. 1991 Morgan Kaufmann.
  • Badler, N. C. Phillips and B. Webber. Simulating Humans: Computer Graphics Animation and Control. 1993 Oxford University Press.
  • Craig, J.. Introduction to Robotics. 1989. Addison Wesley.
  • Parke, F. and K. Waters. Computer Facial Animation. 1996. AK Peters.
    • As you will see most of the readings on Computer Graphics are taken from various Siggraph Proceedings. Since the Proceedings are essentially the "journal of record" for the field, you should try to get back copies for your library. The MIT journal Presence also has a number of interesting articles.

    Syllabus

    *Readings for each class will be available by Wednesday of the previous week in room E15-305.*

    Week 1: Introduction

    Bruce's favorite video clips

    Week 2: Lessons from Character Animation

    Thomas, Lassiter, Maestri

    Week 3: Fundamentals of Movement: Kinematics, Inverse Kinematics, and Dynamics

    Craig, Watt, and Featherstone

    Week 4: Making Them Move: Mixed Approaches to Articulated Figure Locomotion

    Bruderlin, Sims, Girard

    Week 5: Making Them Move: Physically-Based Modeling of Articulated Figures and Motor Learning

    McKenna, Terzopoulos, Sims, Baraff

    Week 6: Learning to Move: Models from Motion Data

    Witkin, Unuma, Rose and Cohen, van de Panne and Fiume

    Week 7: Special Problems: Models for Facial Animation

    Parke & Waters, Essa

    Week 8: Special Problems: Facial Animation cont. Gesture and Speech

    Parke & Waters, Essa, Cassell

    Week 9: Special Problems: Grasping and Planning

    Koga, Thalmann, Badler

    Week 10: Making Them Behave : Creatures as Actors

    Perlin, Bates

    Week 11: Making Them Behave: Creatures as Autonomous Agents

    Blumberg, Terzopoulos, Reynolds

    Week 12: Making Them Behave: Integrating Models of Emotion

    Reilly, Tosa

    Week 13: Making Them Pay

    Dogz & Catz, Quake...

    Week 14:Presentation of Final Projects

    Students

    All pictures are copyright Aardman Animations.