TITLE: Computer Assisted Cel Animation
SPEAKER: Feng Tian (Bournemouth University)

ABSTRACT:
The production of cel animation or classical 2D animation is extremely time consuming, especially the intermediate frame generation (or so called inbetweening) and coloring of frames, which easily take up to 60% of overall production time. As a result many traditional cel animation countries such as UK, Japan, etc. have outsourced the production work to developing countries where the labor is cheaper. In this talk, I am going to present two techniques to tackle the challenge. One is to propose disk B-spline curve modeling to represent strokes or lines of artists’ drawings and then interpolate them to automatically generate in-betweens; the other is to take a hierarchical approach to color animation frames by decomposing a complex line drawing into simple shapes. With the techniques the overall production time of cel animation can be reduced and the animation company may pay more effort on creative aspects.


Bio:
Dr Feng TIAN is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Science & Technology, Bournemouth University. He has been researching in the areas of Computer Graphics, Computer Animation, NPR, etc. and has published over 60 papers in peer reviewed international journals and conferences. Prior to joining in Bournemouth University, he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. As a visiting scholar, he has been visiting and collaborating with a number of universities, including Paris University XI, France, New South-Wales University, Australia, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, etc.