Lecture 1

Went over fundamentals of animation.

Thoughts

Was very similar to content from 60-125 (which I took last semester), so not too many new thoughts. However, talking about the motion capture pipeline and particularly newer learned techniques for animating transitions/pathing was very interesting. I recalled seeing the paper Phase-Functioned Neural Networks for Character Control when it came out, which I found extremely impressive at the time and was one of the first SIGGRAPH papers I learned much about. It was cool to see that people are still making good progress on this problem nearly four years later, and that it’s still not solved! I would also like to learn more about crowd simulation, but we didn’t talk about that much.

Written on February 3, 2021