Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics Library

Simulating Cartoon Style Animation

Author(s): Stephen Chenney, Mark Pingel, Rob Iverson, Marcin Szymanski.
Proceedings: 1st International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR'00), pp. 133--138, Annecy, France, June 3-5, 2002.
[BibTeX]

Abstract:
Traditional hand animation is in many cases superior to simulated motion for conveying information about character and events. Much of this superiority comes from an animator's ability to abstract motion and play to human perceptual effects. However, experienced animators are difficult to come by and the resulting motion is typically not interactive. On the other hand, procedural models for generating motion, such as physical simulation, can create motion on the fly but are poor at stylizing movement. We start to bridge this gap with a technique that creates cartoon style deformations automatically while preserving desirable qualities of the object's appearance and motion. Our method is focused on squash-and-stretch deformations based on the velocity and collision parameters of the object, making it suitable for procedural animation systems. The user has direct control of the object's motion through a set of simple parameters that drive specific features of the motion, such as the degree of squash and stretch. We demonstrate our approach with examples from our prototype system.