04 August 2012

3D Print for Animation

A group of graphics experts led by computer scientists at Harvard have created an add-on software tool that translates video game characters into fully articulated action figures, with the help of a 3D printer. Besides its obvious consumer appeal, the tool constitutes a remarkable piece of code and an unusual conceptual exploration of the virtual and physical worlds. In a virtual world, you have all this freedom that you don't have in the physical world. You can make a character so anatomically skewed that it would never be able to stand up in real life, and you can make deformations that aren't physically possible. You could even have a head that isn't attached to its body, or legs that occasionally intersect each other instead of colliding.


Returning a virtual character to the physical world therefore turns the traditional animation process on its head, in a sort of reverse rendering, as the image that's on the screen must be adapted to accommodate real-world constraints. Spore (an evolution-simulation video game) allows players to create a vast range of creatures with numerous limbs, eyes, and body segments in almost any configuration, using a technique called procedural animation to quickly and automatically animate whatever body plan it receives. As with most types of computer animation, the characters themselves are just skins (meshes of polygons) that are manipulated like marionettes by an invisible skeleton.

More information: