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1. Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 05-Mar-2023 05:57:18 JST Adrian Cochrane

   To make depth-buffered 3D graphics more managable & impressive, there's several techniques commonly used with it. Today I'll cover several of these, without counting data entry techniques like Motion Capture.

   Skeletal & musculature simulations aids animation. Multipass rendering overcomes some limitations of the concurrency strategy. Not to mention various physics sims.

   Though the most important tool is keyframe animation, mentioned the other day as "interpolation"!

   1/4?

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 05-Mar-2023 06:10:32 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     In the early days 3D computer animation took cues from stopmotion & gave their 3D models skeletons. The bones in these skeletons could readily be converted into matrices to apply to selected vertices!

     But if you want to actually render the otherwise-internal anatomy for characters like The Mummy or Two Face, have comically-muscular characters like Mr Incredible, or simply to animate faces you need to actually simulate the muscles. This made its way back to stop-motion via 3D printing.

     2/4?

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 05-Mar-2023 06:36:21 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     If you want to render shadows, portals, mirrors, refraction, etc, etc using the depth buffering algorithm you must render the scene multiple times. Or incorporate raytracing in part or whole.

     This is where it gets difficult to say whether depth-buffering or raytracing is more computationally efficient, it depends on what you want to do!

     Shadows are accomplished by rendering from each light's position, then consulting depth-buffering in final render.

     3/4?

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 05-Mar-2023 06:45:51 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     There's various types of (approximate) physics sims which frequently goes into computer animations!

     Simulating fluids is fairly common, which even works well for fire.

     "Particle" simulations are very common, with front-facing "sprites" being attached to each particle.

     Kinetics simulations are usually used in videogames & (if your model is detailed enough) destruction scenes.

     4/4 Fin for today! Tomorrow: raytracing!