HA4 Task 1 - Applications of 3D

How is 3D used by the interactive media and computer games industries?

Include and comment on examples of work produced using the 3D modelling across a range of industries:

games, TV, film, education, web, medicine, mathematics, engineering, architecture, product design etc.

Remember that you are trying to comprehensively explain the theory and applications of 3D with elucidated examples and consistently using subject terminology correctly.

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3D modelling in Games:

Monster Maze is the first ever 3D game, made in 1982.




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Ocarina of Time was the first Game in the Legend of Zelda series to be visually displayed in 3D and was the most anticipated game of it's time. it was released in 1998.

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A more recent 3D game. Super Mario 3D World, a game on the Wii U released on 29th November 2013. With the improvements in graphics over the years, this is usually the standard for quality in 3D games today.





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images from http://www.tribemagazine.org/4/post/2013/10/the-sinclair-zx81-a-prelude-to-modern-games.html ,
http://fookhar.dk/2008/03/how-to-play-ocarina-of-time-with-cell-shading/ ,
http://www.vandal.net/cgi-bin/vinot.pl?n=1350638854&i=11

3D graphics on Film and TV:

 

First 3D Animation

 

This video was recently re-discovered after being lost for many years. It was produced in 1972 and is believed to be the world's first computer-generated 3D animation.

3D on TV

Star Wars The Clone Wars is one of the many cartoons created using 3D animation.

                         

The series ReBoot, released in 1994, was credited to be the first ever full-length, completely computer-animated TV series.

 

Techniques

3D Animation is carried out by key-framing the camera, lights and objects within a scene. Character movement is created by using rigging or motion capture techniques.

Rigging

Skeletal animation is a technique in computer animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character ,called skin or mesh, and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones ,called the skeleton or rig, used to animate ,pose and keyframe, the mesh. While this technique is often used to animate humans or more generally for organic modeling, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object — a door, a spoon, a building, or a galaxy.

This technique is used in virtually all animation systems where simplified user interfaces allows animators to control often complex algorithms and a huge amount of geometry; most notably through inverse kinematics and other "goal-oriented" techniques. In principle, however, the intention of the technique is never to imitate real anatomy or physical processes, but only to control the deformation of the mesh data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation

 

Motion Capture

 

Motion capture is the process of recording the movement of objects or people. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, and medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robotics. In film making and video game development, it refers to recording actions of human actors, and using that information to animate digital character models in 2D or 3D computer animation. When it includes face and fingers or captures subtle expressions, it is often referred to as performance capture. In many fields, motion capture is sometimes called motion tracking, but in film making and games, motion tracking more usually refers to match moving.

In motion capture sessions, movements of one or more actors are sampled many times per second. Whereas early techniques used images from multiple cameras to calculate 3D positions, often the purpose of motion capture is to record only the movements of the actor, not his or her visual appearance. This animation data is mapped to a 3D model so that the model performs the same actions as the actor. This process may be contrasted to the older technique of rotoscope, such as the Ralph Bakshi 1978 The Lord of the Rings and 1981 American Pop animated films where the motion of an actor was filmed, then the film used as a guide for the frame-by-frame motion of a hand-drawn animated character.

Camera movements can also be motion captured so that a virtual camera in the scene will pan, tilt, or dolly around the stage driven by a camera operator while the actor is performing, and the motion capture system can capture the camera and props as well as the actor's performance. This allows the computer-generated characters, images and sets to have the same perspective as the video images from the camera. A computer processes the data and displays the movements of the actor, providing the desired camera positions in terms of objects in the set. Retroactively obtaining camera movement data from the captured footage is known as match moving or camera tracking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_capture

             

3D in films

3D animation has been used in most recent films and has basically replaced puppets when it comes to things like monsters.

Avengers Assemble uses a lot of 3D animation, from the alien vehicles to the Hulk himself.


                

Compositing

Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live-action shooting for compositing is often referred to as chroma key, blue screen, green screen and other names. Today, most, though not all, compositing is achieved through digital image manipulation. Pre-digital compositing techniques, however, go back as far as the trick films of Georges Méliès in the late 19th century; and some are still in use. All compositing involves the replacement of selected parts of an image with other material, usually, but not always, from another image. In the digital method of compositing, software commands designate a narrowly defined colour as the part of an image to be replaced. Then every pixel within the designated colour range is replaced by the software with a pixel from another image, aligned to appear as part of the original. For example, a TV weather person is recorded in front of a plain blue or green screen, while compositing software replaces only the designated blue or green color with weather maps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing

 

3D in Education

3D graphics and animations can now be used to teach a variety of subjects, for example, teachers can use programs or websites that simulate an environment or event to show things that take place, this can be used in certain subjects like biology or history.

3D in Architecture

Architects are able to use 3D technology to plan buildings and environments and produce visualisations of the finished designs.