EXPLORING DEPTH, PERSPECTIVE AND SPATIAL STUDIES WITH THE APPLICATION OF CAD AND VRML TO DEVELOP BACKGROUND AND SET DESIGN IN ANIMATION.

SOON EU HUI, JONG SZE JOON

Faculty of Creative Multimedia, MULTIMEDIA UNIVERSITY, CYBERJAYA

Abstract

Background design is basically the designing of a location or environment in which the characters will interact with. The main purpose of set and background design is to let the viewers understand the timeline and the place where the story is taking place, and to enhance the mood in every scene or shot and also to inspire the artist how to visualize the story and to set the proper layout. It is essential that a good composition and cinematography can be established by having a proper background or set design. Besides that, most backgrounds play the role of guiding the target audience's eyes to the main focus of the composition. However, some backgrounds lack the features to establish a proper scene or are irrelevant for use. Despite having a good layout, there are still certain rules and regulations regarding the virtual world and the real one in terms of science and space that will play an important role as the projection of a fantasy one.

This research studies the necessary techniques and procedures of studying depth and space to produce a proper way of creating set and background for animation. This includes studies of application in Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Virtual Reality Application (VRML) and other related topics. The findings of the research are a guide to enhance scenes in animation.

What is Background Design?

It can be defined as designing of location or environment and the timeline in which the characters will act. The characteristics of background design are also to create and establish the mood, atmosphere, time, place etc.

· Composition

· Perspective

· Style/Design

· Atmosphere/Mood

The Importance of Background Design

· To let the viewer understand where and when the story happen.

· To enhance mood in every scene or shot.

· To inspire the artist how to visualize the story

How to create a good background design?

· Identifying where and when the story happens.

· Do some visualization or sketches as a whole setting.

· Break-in some important parts of the setting to be visualize in detail.

· Double-check the proportion and perspective in every scene.

· Study some color styling based on the mood and time of the story.

· Color background must not distract the focal point of any scene; unless it is the only subject matter of the given shot.

Viewpoints

In exploring spatial studies, we are able to see or envision from a variety of viewpoints. These alternative points of view give us flexibility in representing our visual thoughts and perceptions. Each type differs, however, in its capability to facilitate the development of ideas.

In the industry today, background artists tend to explore more into the usage of 3D because it is believed that 3D backgrounds will enable more function and thus give more accurate calculations. By implementing 3D background, the designer can explore the space in the scene such as zooming in and out, rotating upwards, downward or even sideways. Even the lighting in the scene will be more accurate because all light sources such as the diffuse lighting, the ambient lighting or even the reflected light, will all be calculated by the computer.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

“The use of CAD as a drafting tool versus its employment as a modeling aid can be synthesized in two buzzword: 2-D and 3-D.” (Bertol, 1997)

Despite its name, CAD (Computer-Aided Design) is least used for the activity of design. A more appropriate definition, for which CAD already provides initials, would be computer-aided drafting. While the efficiency of electronic drafting versus traditional drafting is unquestioned, architects are hesitant to design straight from the keyboard. Often design capabilities are misinterpreted as 2-D efficiency or rendering capacity. The reality is that, in the majority of practices, while drafting is highly automated, the hand sketch is still the primary medium in the exploration of design alternatives.

Being able to build a three-dimensional, CAD generated model is already a good start for design exploration. But visualization by itself does not investigate design strategies or alternatives.

“Wireframe drawing is where CAD began; creating fine line structures in flickering green on black screens.” (Porter, 1997). It remains the underlying function of most CAD programmes that offer the option of assembling an initial drawing in two dimensions or in three dimensions. Once the orthographic co-ordinates of a design are fixed in 2D plans, elevations and sections, they can be exported to 3D programmes where, using a carefully planned layering system, the machine plots the relevant position of end points for their integration into a virtual three dimensional space. The resultant white or multicoloured wireframe perspective provides a valuable first glimpse of a skeletal structure defined in abstract form. Often used as a check on initials ideas previously sketched on a drawing board, many students and practitioners will have the machine assemble them with the hidden line routines omitted so that all the underlying levels of information are simultaneously in view, the resultant image providing a stance which many designers find to be the ideal interface between the physical aspects of a design and the abstract ideas that underpin it.

Fig. 1.0 Spatial Studies for a Computer Generated Café Design.

In addition to this ability to this ability to examine a project using a see through, x-ray vision, there is the attendant ability to command a myriad of possible and, indeed, impossible vantage points from which to generate the views. This provision allows the mind’s eye to preview and rehearse the nature of a spatial complex in flux – a perceptual liberation that echoes the montage approach extolled by Koolhaas and Holl. Yet another aspect of this perceptual freedom is the dynamic provided by the three-point perspective view so quickly generated on a screen - a dynamic which has come to supplant the conventional rigidity of those one- and two-point versions laboriously produced on the drawing board.

Fig.1.2. Wireframe Render of Interior Perspective Shot

Fig. 1.3. Scanline Render of Interior Perspective Shot

A resolved design can be taken to even greater heights of resolution: photographic source material can be scanned in and, for a photo-montaged animation, even fully-rendered building proposals patched into scanned photographs of the site. Also, the incidence of light in a rendered image becomes far more realistic via a technique called ‘ray tracing’. Relying on sophisticated programming, extensive memory and fast computing times, ray tracing is a process in which all the lines of light visible from the viewer’s position are calculated and valued, including light rays passing between objects within a given scene.

In applying all the spatial variables intrinsic to moving pictures, the computer-generation of design concepts represents the first step in a new and exciting adventure into visualization. The challenge of creating a virtual image of a concept in the same virtual space as that occupied by its conceiver now confronts the media. To do so, we have to make a creative leap through television screen and into the world of imagination that lies beyond. Previously the domain of trainee astronauts and video game designers, it is a world that returns us to the full-scale design overtures used by the ancients but this time reconstructed electronically in the pace of our minds.

Digital Space with Virtual Reality (VR)

“The term virtual Universe denotes the database defining a static three-dimensional model and the other components needed to simulate and generate the interactions which take place in a virtual environment.” (Bertol, 1997)

Designing in a Virtual Environment

From the many definitions of virtual reality (VR), there is one that is concordant to the logical tread of this narration: Virtual reality is a computer-generated world involving one or more human senses and generated in real-time by the participant’s actions. The real-time responsiveness of the computer to the participant’s action distinguishes VR from other kinds of computer-generated simulations. The participant in a VR environment is perceiver and creator at the same time, in a world where the object of perception is created by actions.

Immersive Virtual Reality

“There are two means of access to the world of virtual reality: non-immersive and immersive.” (Porter, 1997)

Giuliano Zampi and Conway Lloyd Morgan have outlined several distinctions between non-immersive and immersive virtual reality technologies and other active three-dimensional CAD models. By contrasts to planned flythroughs and walkthroughs, in true virtual reality the user is autonomous, that is, free from predetermined paths and in complete control of every movement. In non-immersive VR, the user is looking into a screen, where as the immmersive user is actually engaged in the virtual realm. Indeed, the immersive user is part of it, rather than a spectator, even one able to move across and into the screen in all directions. There is a further distinction between the two: the creation of the virtual world requires a powerful computer ‘engine’ that not only connects the virtual; space with the user but is capable of representing to him or her a realistic perspective and polychrome environment which, in real time, response quickly, accurately and convincingly to every movement made. The quality of the playback relies on the programming skills and computer memory, aspects of which are still in the process of development.

In the current state of immersive VR technology the hardware worn is normally a headset and data glove, or three-dimensional mouse. The headset, or Head Mounted Display, familiar in fantasy games, is the main part of this operational system. The headset houses two LCD screens: one for each eye. The addition of earphones to the headset means that the wearer can both participate visually in three-dimensional and 360-degree experience as well as stereophonically hear virtual sounds. Data gloves embody tactile feedback sensors which, when touching virtual objects or surfaces, transmit equivalent sensation of resistance and plasticity; pointing or clenching the gloved hand conveys commands to the computer so that movement and the manipulation of virtual objects and spaces is possible.

More lightweight displays and tracking systems are now being developed, small goggles and even contact lenses are coming to replace bulky headsets. Full body suits are available, often used by computer animators to record exactly complete body positions. There is also research which aims to perfect choice command recognition and an ‘eye-tracking’ technology in which playback is projected directly on the retina. In responding to head and eye movements, a newly generated perspective stitched together in real time, is received by the eyes thirty times per second. There are also developments, especially in the computer game industry, in which smells and even tastes can be simulated, but this technology is still in its fancy. Using slimmed-down data gloves, the sense of touch is being increasingly fine-tuned to the point of simulating the sensation of stirring thick substances. However, a crucial aspect of immersion is that the virtual traveler, as in the real world, can see and communicate with others who, similarly garbed, occupy and share the same virtual kingdom.

Albeit confined to a screen, the ability of high-end CAD programmes to provide walkthough and flythroughs allows our mind’s eye to take predetermined journeys through and around the dimensions of a design flux. This ability is the important distinction that separates CAD from all former, traditional modes of 2D representation. What was a single, static and fixed viewpoints in space has become animated – a serial visual experience in which the spatial features of a design concept can, on demand, be viewed as a continuum from all possible vantage points. In non-immersive and immersive constructs of virtual space it is apparent that the primary cue of motion parallax together with all secondary cues to depth are imported and present. However, by replicating all the faculties of human perception in a complete and three-dimensional illusion of real time space, immersive VR systems place the act of designing in a radically new context. It is one in which the drawing board or the monitor screen is replaced by the ability directly to confront and fashion an architecture at full scale and complete with all its spatial variables. Furthermore, within this context the architect together with the client can wander around a design proposal in a new kind of partnership. If VR brings an unexpected setting in which architect and client can co-exist, it also brings the notion of a new rapprochement between them, plus the direct involvement of the client, and with this, the promise of a greater diversity in the outcome.

Virtual Reality Aided Design (VRAD)

Could it be said as a next step to the new evolution in technology as the world of CAD has now been developed to VRAD? (Bertol, 1997), elaborates that, “Virtual reality can be defined as the component of communication which takes place in a computer-generated synthetic space and that embeds humans (actors) as an integral part of the system.” The tangible components of a VR system are the set of hardware and software providing the actors with a three-dimensional, or even more-dimensional, input/output space, in which, at each instant, the actor can interact in real-time with other autonomous objects. Under these premises, VRAD can be defined as computer-aided design using the methods of virtual reality.

Thus, a virtual reality aided system has to be configurable for each actor, to be separable into a public and private sphere, and able to react in a sophisticated way, as well as to offer access to external information and, ultimately, to be navigable. (Bertol, 1997), also stated that the main design goal of a VRAD system should be the possibility for the actor to experience the space.

Interactive Walk-Through

“A great deal of development and research has been undertaken during the last few years to establish virtual reality techniques in architecture. Most of these systems are simply viewing programmes, also known as walk-through system.” (Bertol, 1997). With many different degrees of complexity and detail the immersive walk-through is probably still the main application of VR. The architectural artifact is visually simulated in computer models according to the level of detail allowed by the computer system used and the complexity of the architectural model.