CS229 Final Projects

Final Project Ideas

• Create an animation that tells a story. The only rules are that you follow a good process (storyboarding, animatics, "dailies"), and that you use an interesting algorithmic technique to assist with some portion of the production. The algorithmic technique should assist in creating, editing, or processing some of the motion in the animation.

• Behavior design. Write a procedural algorithm, simulation, or control system to create coordinated behavior for a motion task. Bonus points for being creative about the task.

• Group behaviors. One economical way to animate a large group of characters is to place the characters in a scene, give each character a set of rules to follow, and let your simulation run. A number of researchers have looked at how individual agents following simple, local rules can produce coordinated behavior. Design a project to animate a group of creatures using similar rules.

• Structured randomness. Create statistically reasonable variations on some of our motion capture data. (Check out the Video Textures paper and see me for more references.)

• Animation input devices. For the hardware inclined. One huge problem with animation software is that you are working with a 3D character and scene by looking at them on a 2D screen. 3D devices are sometimes used to help alleviate this problem -- making keyframing look more like stop-motion photography. Mock up a system that will let you use an external device to control an animated character and use it to produce an animation. (The character can be very simple, with just a few moving parts.) How is the result different from what you would really like to have? (Reference: MIT Synthetic Characters web page)

• Goal-oriented IK. Use IK to modify a run cycle or walk cycle to handle stairs or uneven terrain. Create a character who can punch or kick any desired target. Allow a user to control a character's motion by placing and dragging footprints. (See me for references.)

• Balancing / falling. Create a simulated character that can balance or fall.

• Passive dynamics. Ruina and colleagues at Cornell describe how to build a passive walking toy out of tinkertoy parts. Simulate this toy. Simulate the behavior of this toy. Over what range of circumstances does your simulation work?

• Implement an algorithm from a SIGGRAPH paper. From the packet, the following are definitely worth a second look with the final project in mind: Perlin '95, Chi et al. '00, Lee and Shin '99, Witkin and Kass '88, van de Panne and Fiume '93, Grzeszczuk and Terzopoulos '95, Rademacher '99, Ngo et al. '00.