Panel Statement

Panel: Serious Animation: Beyond Art and Entertainment

The ma­jor­ity of cloth sim­u­la­tion al­go­rithms and soft­ware ap­pli­ca­tions in com­puter graph­ics are de­signed to sup­port vir­tual gar­ment cre­ation for an­i­mated char­ac­ters or vi­sual ef­fects (e.g su­per­hero capes). In these cases the pri­mary ob­jec­tive is for the sim­u­lated gar­ment to sup­port the per­for­mance of the actor. The cloth is di­rected by the an­i­ma­tor to be­have in a man­ner that is be­liev­able rather than ac­cu­rate. Ac­cu­racy (or fi­delity) is not the pri­mary goal; a so­lu­tion that is sim­ply plau­si­ble is usu­ally good enough for en­ter­tain­ment. For our pur­poses we need to vir­tu­ally pro­to­type gar­ments with a high level of mo­tion fi­delity. The MoCCA pro­ject in­ves­ti­gates the re-task­ing of dig­i­tal cloth sim­u­la­tion for pur­poses be­yond en­ter­tain­ment. We are sim­u­lat­ing ap­pli­ca­tions where gar­ments are em­ployed to sup­port the de­ploy­ment of a range of wear­able tech­nolo­gies (e.g. search and res­cue, crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion, etc) In these cases it is use­ful to be able to ac­cu­rately pre­dict the be­hav­iour of var­i­ous ma­te­ri­als in a range of en­vi­ron­ments and sce­nar­ios.

• Dr. Chris Row­land is Head of An­i­ma­tion at DJCAD and leads the 3D Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion Re­search Lab. His re­search in­ter­ests are cen­tred around ex­ploit­ing an­i­matin method­ol­ogy to in­ves­ti­gate real world prob­lems. His col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­jects in­clude the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of his­toric and en­vi­ron­men­tally sig­nif­i­cant ship­wrecks on the seabed from multi­beam sonar data . Pro­jects have in­cluded the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of sunken Russ­ian Nu­clear sub­marines in the Arc­tic Cir­cle. Re­cently vi­su­al­is­ing the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil rig, which lies a mile be­neath the sea in the Gulf of Mex­ico after caus­ing the biggest oil spill in US his­tory in April 2010.