Seeing The Forest For The Trees

Ever since animation started as an art form, the backgrounds have always remained static. Sure you might have a variety of doorways, end tables, and lamps, but, inevitably, as the cat chased the mouse, you’d see the same background loop around and around.

But with a new computer animation program from the University of Bath, perhaps we’ll soon see very dynamic backgrounds. Dr. Peter Hall and Chris Li in the university’s computer science department recently developed a program that allows a computer to capture a real tree’s movement animating the tree and then easily cloning it to make a full forest of unique trees.

The designer draws an outline around the tree from a frame in the video. This is probably the only time consuming-part as you have to get this right otherwise all the other trees will look funny. Then the program makes a model of the tree and tracks how the leaves move. Once the program has the movement down, it can start its own clone machine and start producing trees that are slightly different from each other.

The program can animate the trees in different seasons and weather. Besides, the trees, the program can also render smoke, water,cloud, and fire that’s very close to the real world.

Li’s program, developed as part of this PhD, has interest from several animation companies. Of note is Aardman, creators of Wallace and Grommit.

[via Science Daily]