Question

Technical Report                              

The Structure of the Technical Report

• Prepare a technical report on 3D      Animation Movie Using Autodesk Maya and Motion Capture Technology.

• The technical report should be      followed the given structure:

Report should follow the given structure:

COVER PAGE

LIST OF FIGURES

LIST OF TABLES

CHAPTER 1. Introduction

·        Introduction

·        Problem statement

·        Goal

·        Objective

·        Project Timeline (Gantt Chart)

·        Report Organization

Chapter 2 Literature Review

·        Introduction

·        History of Animation

·        Technique Applied in Animation

1.      Traditional Animation

2.      Computer Animation

·        2D Animation

·        Difference in 2D and 3D Animation

·        Theme

·        Conclusion

Chapter 3: Analysis

·        Introduction

·        Requirement

1.       Hardware Requirements

2.      Software Requirements

3.      Functional Requirements

General Instructions:

1.      Form a group of a maximum of three (3) members.

2.      Submit the names of your team members within a week

3.      Examples taken from the internet should be cited with proper references.

4.      Copied work will be gets zero marks

 

Documentation Format:

·        Required parts should be complete; all figures, tables and diagrams are clearly and logically identified and strongly support the text.

·        The report should include a professional cover page and index. Proper font type (choose either Times New Roman or Arial for the entire document), black color and size 12 are applied with appropriate margins. Choose line spacing 2. Make all subheadings bold. Justify.

·        All pages must be numbered.

·        Please do it in a neat A4 Sheet.

·        Number of pages between (10-20) pages.

·        The plagiarism for the final report must be not more than 20%.

 

Note: The last day of submission will be on December 17, 2020

-         50 marks: Refer to the distributed grads as below:

 

 

 

 

Teacher’s/Marker’s   Comments		Rubrics
		Writing Dimensions/Weight	30
		Structure		5
		Graphics		5
		Figures, and Tables		10
		Formatting		10
		Mechanics		10
		Documentation and References		10
Marker’s Name		Total Marks/ Marks   Awarded		50
Signature		Grade Equivalent

 

 

 

 

 

Answer 1

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION:

Introduction:

At the early age of Animation, It was done by hand and all of the frames in animation had to be drawn on a piece of paper. A tremendous amount of work is essential even to develop the shortest animated films.However, the development of computer technology has driven the new era in Animation in which where it is today. From the invention of software that enables an animator to develop 2-Dimensional animation to the invention of software that enables an animator to develop 3-Dimensional Animation, the area of animation have been developed and it is used in Many Industries today. Nowadays, the 3D character is used to perform actions in many films that cannot be reached or done by a human character. This is especially for the Animal character, fiction science character, and many more. We have seen many 3D Animation films in the market today. There are two kinds of 3D Film, the first one is a cartoon character and the second one is a real character. For Example is King Kong, Lord of the Rings and Dinosaur which is the use of 3D Character that looks like it is in reality. The Examples of 3 Animation using Cartoon Character as Shrink, Over the Hedge, Toy Story, and Aunt Bully.Talking about 3-dimensional Animation, people will imagine the movement of realistic characters which is the same as in the real life.

The development of 3D animation today. makes the 3D elements useful in multiple aspects. For example, 3D is used for the purpose of Advertisements for Television, film production, video clip production, and also the games industry. The most popular one of the usage of 3D is in film production.

Problem Statement:

In 3D Animation development, the most critical problem is to create a good character that could attract the user's attention.The weakness in character design can cause the story will not be understandable and the message of the story will not be reached by the end-users. Today, 3D Animation has become the popular types of animation to create stories or simple animation movie. This happens due to the rapid changes from 2D Animation to 3D Animation. 2D Animation looks flat and the movement of characters looks unrealistic. This makes the story being developed look immature. In the rapid development of animation today, most of the animation being created focuses on comedy, wars, and happening stories. There is less animation story that focuses on moral values. Thus, in the developing projects, the focus was given to developing a story that conveyed a moral value that is suitable for the Target Users.

This scenario causes the message to be brought by 2D Animation sometimes cannot be reached to the audience. In terms of the film industry, 3D Animation becomes one of the most important parts especially for the story which involves science fiction. The limitations of action which can be done by a human actor force the film director to hire a good animator to create an animation for certain characters in the movie. This can be done such as the character of Dinosaur movie and the character of Big Snake in Anaconda movie

Goal:

The goal of this 3D Animation Project is to develop 3D Animation short stories that have a moral value and can be emotionally entertaining whistle educating people, especially children. The entire story is brought to the audience in a simple 3D animation.

Objective:

In developing this 3D Animation there are some objectives that would like to be achieved.The objective of this project as stated below.

• To develop an interesting 3D Animation which may attract users,s especially children.
• To entertain people watching 3D Animation besides promoting good value to people especially children 3D Animation story.

Target User:

By knowing the Target users then, a relevant story can be developed to fulfill the goals of the project. The target user for this project is children aged below 12 years old. This is because children's age is the most suitable age to learn about positive values. However, the story can also be watched by different ages of people. General, the goal of the development of a 3D Animation story is to attract users to watch and enjoy the story. However, to attract the user's attention to the user on the story being developed, the animation or developer should know the target user of the story.

Report Organization:

This report contains 3 chapters.

The first chapter is the Introduction. The introduction chapter describes basic animation development. Besides, it also touches on the goals and objectives of the project and general information on animation development which is based on the weaknesses and the problem faced by the early style of animations.

The second chapter is the literature review. A literature review consists of the history of animation and the evolutions in animation which brought it to the 3D Animation level. A brief description of the animation being developed with the theme and a few elements related to the animation field also discussed.

The third chapter of this report concerned on analysis of hardware and software requirements which will be used to develop this 3D Animation project. The explanation of the hardware and software used on both sides of the developer and end-user was discussed briefly.

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction:

Nowadays, animation has become one of the most developed fields in multimedia. It is being used in many areas of industry, especially in the film industry, advertising, and promotion, education, and also the game industry. However, peoples are never alert on how the animation was begun and some particular thing which brings the animation to what is today.

Thus, this chapter will touch briefly on the history of animation, techniques being used in animation, 2D Animation, and the evolution from 2D to 3D Animation, the use of 3D Animation in the film industry, and also the difference between 2D and 3D Animation.

History of Animation:

Animation did not just happen instantly. Many people contribute to make animation on what is today and make computer animation at all possible. From using the movie images which consist of many sketches of the scene drawn on a paper, then developing techniques for creating animation using a computer the field of animations has developed to what it is today.

The animation is a technique of moving characters by a combination of frames of pictures following the sequence of their movements. The word 'Animation' comes from the Japanese word 'anime' which means breath, wind, air, and alive. The development of animation is driven by the invention of electronic devices which can be present the animation to the audience.

In 1831 Dr. Joseph Antoine Plateau and Dr. Simon Rittrer constructed a machine called a phenakistoscope which produced an illusion of movement by allowing a viewer to gaze at a rotating disk containing small windows, behind which was another disk containing a sequence of images. Then the disks were rotated at the correct speed, the synchronization of the windows with the images created an animated effect. However, as time goes by many devices have been invented which enable the end-users to watch and enjoy the animation. The first animated film is "Fantagmagore" which was released in 1908 done by Cohl. After that many animated films have been created and few animation companies have been set up involved in the animation industry. The early company that monopolies the animation industry such as Kansas City Slide Company (1920), Walt Disney Studio (1992), and Bray Studio (1923). All of the early animations was created in 2D animation.

However, trials to make 3D animation has been started before the invention of computers. That is, in 1936 Max Fleischer produces "POPEYE THE SAILOR MEETS SINBAD THE SAILOR" a 20-minute film. It is shot on a horizontal rig with 3- Dimensional models for background and the characters drawn on cels and placed between two sheets of glass and set in front of the models. And today, animation has become one of the biggest industries in the broadcasting field. It is used not only for the purpose of films and cartoon production only, even in other fields such as advertisements, games, and education.

Technique Applied in Animation:

From the early age of Animation until today, there are many techniques that have been applied to create animation. Generally, types of animation techniques can be classed into two categories which are given below:

1.Traditional Animation

Traditional animation consists of many techniques. The most popular are Cel Animation and Rotoscoping. Before the use of cel animation of the entire frame, including the background and all characters and items, were drawn on a single sheet of paper, and then photographed. A simple example of using the cel animation technique would be a scene with two characters on screen, one of which is talking and the other standing silently. Since the latter character is not moving, it can be displayed in this scene using only one drawing, on one cel, while multiple drawings on multiple cels will be used to animate the speaking character.Everything had to be redrawn for each frame containing movements. However, after the cel animation invented by Earl Hurd and John Bray in 1915, it becomes an important innovation to traditional animation. An example of the usage of cel animation in figure 2.1, given below:

It shows how to transparent cels, each with a different character drawn on them, and an opaque background are photographed together to form the composite image.

Character Cel Camera Character Cel Composite Image Background

The second popular method of traditional animation is Rotoscoping. It was invented by MaxFliescher in 1915. In the Rotoscoping technique animation is "traced" over actual film footage of actors and scenery. Traditionally, the live-action will be printed out the frame and registered.

2 Computers Animation

As time goes by the invention of the computer in late 1940 has changed the way animation is created. After the computer age comes, the animation designer moves to an animation studio, where there the outline drawings scanned into the computer and filled with digital paint instead of colored by hand like in cel animation. This involves modeling, motion generation, followed by the addition of surfaces and finally rendering. Surfaces are programmed to stretch and bend automatically in response to movements of a 'wire from model', and the final rendering converts such as movements to a bitmap image. By computer, working in animation becomes easier and fast. Computer animation has developed rapidly, to the current stage where movies can be created with characters so life-like as to approach indistinguishability from live-action actors. It is the recent developments in rendering complex surfaces like fur and clothing textures that have enabled stunningly life-like environments and character models, including surfaces that even ripple, fold and blow in the wind, with every fiber on hair individually calculated for rendering.

2D Animation:

2D Animation is the early style in animation before the development of 3D Animation. The concept of 2D Animation is arranging pictures or images in sequence following the order of the movements. This called frame oriented or picture by picture. In Developing 2D Animation, the animator or developer needs to draw the same character in multiple movements on a piece of paper After that, the papers contain the movement of the image will move quickly to make the characters look alive.

Nowadays, with computer technology, 2D animation becomes a bit easy to be done. Animator just needs to master 2D Animation software to create an animation. Many 2D Animation stories have been created and it is dominating the animation market until today. However, the movements of the character in 2D Animation took flat and sometimes not attractive.

Difference between 2D and 3D Animation:

The difference between 2D and 3D animation can be seen in image design, character movements, background, coloring styles, and many more. In terms of images, 3D Animation looks realistic and attractive than 2D animation which the image took flat. In 3D animation, the character is designed to look alive so that it can attract the end-user. The CGI technique help animator to create great animation movements rather than using the manual technique. In terms of background and stage development, 3D Animation can be matched with the real background. Since the character looks realistic, so there is no problem to combine 3D animation with a realistic background. This cannot be done in 2D Animation where animators forced to draw the background of every scene in a story. In terms of coloring styles, the 3D animation used many tones of color that makes it look more attractive in realistic. This does not go too 2D animation.

Theme:

The definition of the theme is the main concept of a story. The theme should come together with the story that is going to present to the end-users. A good theme will make a story to be consigned accurately and easily understand by the end-users. There are a few themes which are always being used in a story such as

• Wars
• Family
• Heroism
• Love
• Friendship
• Terrified
• Comedy
• Religious

Sometimes there is also a combination of themes in a story. It aims to reinforce the storyline or the animation is presented.

Conclusion:

This chapter, it has shown how animation was begun in the early day of animation. It also discussed 2D and 3D Animation briefly and some examples of 2D and 3D animation films. The development from 2D to 3D animation is driven by the invention of many programs such as Maya and 3D Max. These programs made creating 3D Characters and 3D animated projects possible. With the popularity of movies like Toy Story and Shriek, the genre of 3D animated films has established its place in 21st Century culture. What's more, there a demand for 3D Animation over and beyond what animation houses and movie studios are currently producing.

CHAPTER 3: ANALYSIS

Introduction

The development of a project needs some requirements to make the project perform better and achieves the goals and the projects. In developing 3D animation, the capabilities of computers and hardware play a big impact on the animation quality. The animator should determine the minimum and maximum requirement of hardware and else software to be used to develop a good and attractive animation.

Requirements

To ensure this project implemented effectively, some computer hardware and software are required. In this project, the hardware used as a minimal rate of capabilities to create an animation. This is due to the restriction such as the high cost is the most important thing in animation development.

There are a few of3D animation software sold in the market today. It comes with many capabilities to help users or animate to create 3D animation. However, in developing 3D Animation, there is also some other software being used to edit graphics, sound and to make a simple animation.

1 Hardware Requirements

The hardware requirements used in this project are:

• Central Processing Unit (CPU) Intel Pentium 4, 3.06Ghz
• Hard Disk, Maxtor 80 GB SATA II
• Graphics Card, 128 MB (ATI Radeon 9450)
• Memory Chip (RAM), DDR2 512 MB
• Keyboard
• USB Mouse
• Monitor, Acer LCD monitor 15"Inch
• Printer and Scanner
• Storage Devices (Thumb Drive), Kingston 1 GB.
• CD-Rom Drive, Samsung 52X Max, and
• DVD-RW Drive, BenQ Double Player

While for the user the hardware requirement they need to view this 3D Animation is a set of desktop computer or laptop which least have capabilities such as:

• Intel Pentium III (1.06Ghz above)
• Integrated Graphics Slots, and
• Monitor and Speaker

2 Software Requirements

This list of software used in this project are shown below:

• Autodesk 3ds Max8
• Autodesk Maya 2013
• Adobe Photoshop CS6
• Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
• Adobe After Effects CS6
• Windows XP, Windows 7 Operating System

3 Functional Requirements

Below is the explanation for the hardware used in this project:

1. Central Processing Unit (CPU) Intel Pentium 4, 3.06 GHz

The power of processing units being used influenced the performance of 3D animation being developed. The processor determines how fast data can be processed. The minimum specification to develop 3D animation is Intel Pentium 4, 1.5 GHz, and maximum until Intel Pentium D, 3.60 GHz.

2. Hard Disk, Maxtor 80 GB SATA II

Internal Hard Disk used in these projects is required to store all the information being collected, store the model is created and stored the end product of 3D animation. The minimum capacity of the storage device can be used as little as 20 GB.

3. Graphics Card, 128 MB

To enhance the graphical presentation of the 3D Animation it is suggested the graphics card should be installed into the computer. This is because it will give a good view of animation to the user rather than using integrated graphics.

4. Memory Chip (RAM), DDR2 512 MB

The efficiency of a computer also depends on Random Access Memory (RAM). RAM is a place where the memory of the application being used is stored. The higher the RAM power would help in the rendering process in terms of time-consuming. For this project, the lower power of RAM that can be used is 512 MB and u to the maximum power of 2 GB.

5. CD-Rom Drive, Samsung 52Max Used to install some software comes with a CD.

6. DVD-RW Drive, BenQ double-layer Used to install some software comes with DVD. It is also used to burn the final product of these projects inside the CDs or DVD.

7.Windows XP Professional, Windows 7 Operating System, Service Pack 2. Basically, this is the main system used to run all the software used in these projects. It supports the operation of the software used.

8. Keyboard

Used in the typing process (insert the data) and help in the overall of the 3D production.

9. USB Mouse

Help animator to perform his work on these projects (Editing graphics, create animation characters, editing sounds and etc).

10 Monitor, Acer LCD monitor 15"Inch

Display the work being done and the end products of these projects. The wider the screen the more visual satisfaction achieved. Minimum specifications is 15" Inch and the maximum 17" Inch.