Technique Has Improved Quality of Animation in a Number of Video Games
Thank Zhigang Deng and Binh Le the next time you play Need for Speed. Their work has improved the quality of animation in a wide number of video games.
Deng, professor of computer science at the 葫芦影业, and Le, a former Ph.D. student in Deng鈥檚 lab and now a senior scientist at Electronic Arts, came up with the technique known as Smooth Skinning Decomposition with Rigid Bones, or SSDR, and described it in a published in ACM Transactions on Graphics.
The technique involves an automated algorithm that can effectively simulate movement for objects without a skeleton 鈥 water, for example, or a flowing cape.
Animators start with a skeleton when illustrating the movement of people or animals, Deng said. 鈥淭hat informs how the movement should be animated. But for things like clothing or water, it鈥檚 harder.鈥
He and Le noticed that the movement in games and other animations 鈥渨asn鈥檛 quite right,鈥 he said.
So they came up with a solution, a technique that has since been incorporated into many mainstream graphics and animation packages, including Autodesk Maya (known as 鈥渂ake deformer鈥) and SideFX Houdini (known as 鈥渟kinning converter鈥), as well as a number of game studios. You can read more about it on the . SSDR also can be used in animating people and animals.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a way to bring higher quality animation into games,鈥 Le said.
He and Deng addressed the problem by identifying a set number of 鈥渉andles鈥 鈥 known in the graphics industry as 鈥渂ones鈥 鈥 at a number of points on the object to be animated.
They then wrote an algorithm that allows animators to spur naturalistic movement when one of the handles is manipulated, Deng said. Individually animating each point 鈥 there may be thousands of points in a frame 鈥 is too time-consuming and expensive.
Deng and Le said they didn鈥檛 patent the technique 鈥 鈥淲e did not realize how the industry would react to it,鈥 Deng said 鈥 and it has since been incorporated into several animation tools for game production.
Le, who earned his Ph.D. from UH in 2014, said the technique and subsequent adaptations
have allowed game designers to offer the same high-quality animation as is seen in
movies. 鈥淧layers expect that,鈥 he said, especially in complex story-telling games.
鈥淲hen we published the paper, we were not expecting it to have such an impact on the
industry,鈥 Deng said. 鈥淏ut sometimes you never know.鈥
- Jeannie Kever, University Media Relations