IDS 252: Topics for the Week of October 1, 2007

• Wed: Look at work from Lab 5: Rendering, Lights, and Shading. Do evaluation (Word doc).

• Introduce Lab 6: Conveying Emotion and Mood through Gesture.

  • A gesture is defined as "a movement or position of the hand, arm, body, head, or face that is expressive of an idea, opinion, emotion, etc.: the gestures of an orator; a threatening gesture." (dictionary.com)
  • Drawing examples
  • Caravaggio
  • In animation
  • Books by Ed Hooks, e.g. Acting for Animators
  • Pick an "emotion" word out of a hat.

• Lights:

  • Look at Monet's Haystacks
  • Lights - types of lights
  • Three-point lighting
    • Examples.
    • Cinematography: Part 2: Mise-en-scene: Section 2 - Lighting
    • Pixel Cinematography
  • Shadows - Shadow maps vs ray traced shadows.

• Materials, Shading, and Rendering

  • Good source of textures: Mayang.
  • Lambert, Blinn, phong
  • Maps
  • Bump Mapping
  • Rendering Methods
    • Scanline - Fastest approach. Each polygon is projected point by point onto the view screen. A zbuffer is generally used to deal with objects that obscure other objects. Can't do reflection or refraction except as a hack. Can do shadows.
    • Ray Tracing: Much slower than scanline but produces much more realistic lighting. Best for highly reflective (as opposed to diffuse) surfaces. Does much better job on shadows than scanline.
    • Radiosity: A more advanced type of rendering that is good for diffuse surfaces. It is available in the mental-ray renderer in Maya but is tricky to use (so don't use it).
  • Reflections and transparency
  • Anti-aliasing, Hypergraph