Animated Characters

by Justin Hong

This is my final project for Dr. Sueda's CSCE 489 Computer Animation course. In this project, I implemented skinning and keyframes to animate character walking. There are seven keyframes placed and rotated at arbitrary locations then drew Catmull-Rom splines in between each of the seven keyframes. Then using these keyframes, I drew the character model to interpolate between the keyframes and animated her walking along the splines that I drew. The character can walk along the loop normally, in reverse, freeze for a moment, disappear abruptly and teleport along the splines too.

I downloaded skinned characters with a walking animation from www.mixamo.com, then borrowed Dr. Sueda's FBX extractor to convert a .fbx file into .obj files. Then using a software called Blender, I extracted the character's textures into a .jpg file. The main model I used for developing was the Kachujin model, but my project also works with the Big Vegas model and Akai model too.

What Techniques did I use?

Linear Blend Skinning Techniques

Keyframed Animation Techniques

What libraries did I utilize?

I wrote most of my code using C++. However, I also used OpenGL in order to draw the .obj files for the character, and draw the keyframes and splines. A little bit of GLSL was also used for shading.

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