Academic literature on the topic 'Animated characters'

PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO<br>O presente estudo analisa os aspectos comunicativos da visualidade de personagens de curta-metragens de animação contemporâneos brasileiros, empregando recursos oferecidos pela Semiologia. O cinema de animação é uma arte que tomou contornos na virada do século XX. Junto à indústria cultural, consolidou inúmeras personagens na memória de espectadores em todo o mundo. Contudo, os altos custos de produção das obras animadas obrigam muitos artistas a realizarem seus filmes independentes no formato de curtas metragens. Devido à brevidade dos filmes, esses criadores empregam repetidamente tipos e caricaturas como personagens principais, apresentando-os sob a forma de signos de fácil reconhecimento pela maioria dos espectadores. Esta pesquisa parte da hipótese de que a visualidade das personagens de obras cinematográficas de animação breves é um sistema projetado (intencionalmente ou não) para transmitir ao espectador mensagens de compreensão praticamente imediata a respeito da narrativa apresentada e dos conceitos personificados pelas personagens no curto intervalo de tempo em que elas estão em cena. Com base no levantamento de sessenta principais personagens apresentadas nos filmes brasileiros premiados no festival Anima Mundi em suas doze primeiras edições (1993-2004), esta dissertação investigou os estereótipos existentes nas produções recentes do cinema de animação brasileiro. Em seguida, buscou delinear maneiras com que os elementos visuais que os constituem atuam no processo de significação das personagens animadas, articulando-se enquanto uma linguagem visual específica. Para realizar tal investigação, os procedimentos metodológicos adotados tomaram por fundamentos os estudos de Semiologia de Roland Barthes e o conceito de atributos das personagens desenvolvido por Vladimir Propp.<br>This paper analyses the communicative aspects of the look of contemporary Brazilian animation short movie´s characters, using resources from Semiology. Animation cinema became an art at the beginning of the 20th century. With the cultural industry, it has cemented lots of characters in spectator´s memories around the world. However, the high expenses of animated movies´ production force many artists to produce their authorial animations as short movies. Due to the brevity of these movies, their creators repeatedly use types and caricatures as main characters, presented morphologically as signs that can easily be recognized by most of the audiences. This research considers the hypothesis that the look of characters from animated short movies is a system designed (intentionally or not) to communicate to the spectator messages of prompt comprehension concerned to the narrative shown and to the concepts personified by the characters in the short period of time in which they are acting. Based on the survey of sixty main characters from Brazilian awarded movies at the twelve first editions of Anima Mundi festival (1993- 2004), this dissertation investigated the existing stereotypes in recent Brazilian animation short movies. Then, it tried to outline ways in which the visual elements that constitute these stereotypes act in the signifying process of the animated characters, working together as a specific visual language. In order to carry out such investigation, the adopted methodological procedures were based on Roland Barthes´ Semiology and Vladimir Propp´s concept of characters´ attributes.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1999.<br>Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-68).<br>Implicit surface modeling in computer graphics is a powerful technique for representing smooth and organic shapes. Skeletal elements of an implicit surface blend to create a smooth, seamless skin which exhibits desired properties for animation such as squash and stretch. Because of their high computational cost to render, implicit surfaces have not been used extensively in the real-time graphics domain. This thesis discusses the problems and some solutions in the application of implicit surfaces to the domain of interactive character animation. A design process for an implicit surface-based character is proposed, from the modeling and texturing stages to animation and rendering.<br>by Kenneth Bradley Russell.<br>S.M.

This creative thesis involved making an animated short film from scratch, dubbed “Laundry Day” for the time being. The film follows two sentient clothing characters, a hoodie and a pair of pants, who need to get out of their owner’s room to get to the laundry room after accidentally being left behind. Please watch the short here and use the password “goodiehoodie”: https://vimeo.com/415387205 This was a time consuming, challenging, and multifaceted project, but provided an accurate glimpse into how feature animation is made. The process of making any project like this is commonly called a pipeline, and can be simplified to seven categories: Story, Character, Environment, Animation, Effects, and Rendering. This paper will go into each of these and explain the technical and creative challenges I had to overcome to reach the final product.

One of the common research goals in disciplines such as computer graphics and robotics is to understand the subtleties of human motion and develop tools for recreating natural and meaningful motion. Physical simulation of virtual human characters is a promising approach since it provides a testbed for developing and testing control strategies required to execute various human behaviors. Designing generic control algorithms for simulating a wide range of human activities, which can robustly adapt to varying physical environments, has remained a primary challenge. This dissertation introduces methods for generic and robust control of virtual characters in an interactive physical environment. Our approach is to use the information of the physical contacts between the character and her environment in the control design. We leverage high-level knowledge of the kinematics goals and the interaction with the surroundings to develop active control strategies that robustly adapt to variations in the physical scene. For synthesizing intentional motion requiring long-term planning, we exploit properties of the physical model for creating efficient and robust controllers in an interactive framework. The control design leverages the reference motion capture data and the contact information with the environment for interactive long-term planning. Finally, we propose a compact soft contact model for handling contacts for rigid body virtual characters. This model aims at improving the robustness of existing control methods without adding any complexity to the control design and opens up possibilities for new control algorithms to synthesize agile human motion.

Virtual Environments have demonstrated effectiveness for social task training such as medical training (Anolli, Vescovo, Agliati, Mantovani, & Zurloni, 2006). These types of Virtual Environments have used emotional animated characters. Even though emotions have a strong influence on human-human interactions (Gratch, Mao, & Marsella, 2006), typical system evaluation does not assess whether human and animated emotional displays are perceived similarly by observers. Moreover, the Uncanny Valley, which is a drop in believability as characters become more realistic, threatens the assumption that emotions displayed by an animated character and a human would be interpreted similarly. Thus, it is not known how appropriate the perception to a realistic emotional animated character is. This issue is especially important for social task training which require animated characters to be perceived as social and emotional partners so that trainees would be confronted with situations comparable to real life ones. Using an approach similar to the one proposed by Nass & Moon (2000) in their work on the Media Equation, this thesis investigates how emotional body language displayed by animated characters is interpreted. A psychological experiment was conducted to investigate if emotional body language would be an appropriate way for animated characters to display emotion. This was done by comparing the interpretation of emotional body language displayed by animated characters with that by real actors. The results showed that animated body language can be accurately interpreted. However, the videos of the actor were found to be more emotional, more believable and more natural than the animated characters, whilst displaying the same emotional body language. Moreover, there was a significant difference in the number of correctly interpreted negative emotions displayed. Although, there was not a difference for positive emotions. This could be due to the physical appearance of the animated character or to the loss of micro-gestures inherent to Motion Capture technology. Thus, a second comparative study was conducted to investigate the potential causes for this drop in believability and recognition. It investigated the effect of changing the level of physical realism of the animation as well as deteriorating the quality of the emotional body language itself. Whilst no effect was found regarding the deterioration of the emotional body language, the results show that the videos of the Actor were found to be more emotional, more believable and more natural than the two animated characters. These findings have strong implications for the use of Virtual Environments for social task training.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.<br>Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.<br>Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-107).<br>In this thesis, I describe a method of animating characters using physical simulation. The main advantage of this approach, verses traditional keyframing methods, is that the animated character can react to physical interactions. These reactions can be synthesized in real-time in interactive applications, such as video games, where traditional approaches can only playback pre-recorded sequences. Physically simulating a character requires a controller, but creating a controller is known to be a challenging task, especially when animation concerns about the style of the motion are taken into consideration. This thesis describes a method of generating a controller automatically and quickly from an input motion. The stylistic aspects of the controller are particularly easy to control, as they are a direct result of the input motion. In order to generate a controller from an input motion, I address two main challenges. First, the input motion must be rectified (minimally modified) to ensure that it is physically plausible. Second, a feedback strategy must be formulated to generate control forces during the simulation. The motion rectification problem is addressed by formulating a fast trajectory optimization that solves for a reference motion. The reference minimally deviates from the input motion to satisfy physical constraints. The second challenge is addressed by employing a novel phase-indexed controller that uses a combination of local and global feedback strategies to keep the character tracking the reference motion. Beyond tracking just a single reference motion, I also demonstrate how variation to a input motion can be automatically synthesized using the same trajectory optimization method used in the rectification process, and how these variations can be sequenced, using optimal control, to accomplish various goals.<br>by Yeuhi Abe.<br>Ph.D.

This study presents a design framework for helping Chinese companies and designers to create effective animated cartoon characters for promoting brands. Previous research has demonstrated that animated characters which companies use to promote their brands appear to have a good chance of gaining and holding consumers’ attention. However, most relevant research in this area was conducted decades ago and focused on TV advertisements. There is little relevant research into new media advertisements featuring animated characters in an international context even though online advertising is growing. Furthermore, several academic researchers in China have begun to explore this topic without the benefit of practical research. As a result, the Animated Cartoon Promotional Characters (ACPC) are rarely developed and used although the animation industry has boomed in the Chinese market. ACPC for client companies which are created by commercial designers or design studios are not always in accordance with the preferences of their target customers. A design framework is therefore needed to provide a detailed design procedure for potential customer involvement. In order to achieve this, the Sanyuan Foods Company has been involved as a case study in this research. A series of surveys and focus groups with potential customers and interviews with Sanyuan and professional animators have been employed to improve the design process, to explore and identify more effective design procedures and to develop a design framework for the production of ACPCs. Secondary research has also been conducted in order to trace the historical issues and growth of promotional characters which have been employed successfully by selected companies; to determine the design process and fundamental features, functions and narrative for these animated promotional characters; and to discuss the relationship between different age groups and promotional characters, customers' favour and loyalty. The final framework has been evaluated by the development and testing of a “family“ of 2D and 3D hybrid computer characters for Sanyuan Foods and a series of short promotional animations and web site. Results show positive agreement with theoretical predictions and significant improvement over previous efforts. The research presented here has significant implications for future studies on branding strategy.