We have an exciting new update to Project Draco available for feedback on Autodesk Labs - you can now import pictures to layers to have fun with photos of your friends and family!
The latest technology preview adds some important features for working with photos and detailed illustrations:
The biggest improvement is that you can now import images to layers
With this comes an eraser tool for tweaking the layers
For exporting your movies you now have control over the resolution and duration
You can turn this...
...into this!
Let's take a look at how we can do this with some falling leaves. First prepare some leaves.
Project Draco is now available as a technology preview on Autodesk Labs. Sign up now and see how easy animation can be. And watch this fun movie showing off some of the possibilities!
If you haven't seen Project Draco before or need some inspiration, take a look at some of the creations below! In a nutshell, Draco allows artists to easily add animation to their illustrations and photos with an easy-to-use, sketch-based paradigm.
Tuesday, 11 August 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 152
Justin Solomon, Fernando de Goes, Gabriel Peyré, Marco Cuturi, Adrian Butscher, Andy Nguyen, Tao Du, Leonidas Guibas
This paper introduces a new class of algorithms for optimization problems involving optimal transportation over geometric domains. The main contribution is to show that optimal transportation can be made tractable over large graphics domains, such as images and triangle meshes, improving performance by orders of magnitude compared to previous work.
Introducing OmniAD, a novel data-driven pipeline to model and acquire the aerodynamics of three-dimensional rigid objects simply by capturing their falling motion using a single camera. OmniAD enables realistic real-time simulation of rigid bodies and interactively designed three-dimensional kites that actually fly.
This course reviews current 3D printing hardware and software pipelines, and analyzes their potential and shortcomings. Then it focuses on computational specification for fabrication methods, which allow designing or computing an object's shape and material composition from a functional description.
Science Magazine recently published an article called Your Brain is like a Wad of Paper. When the team at Autodesk Research saw it Jos Stam recalled that it looks like a simulation Duncan Brinsmead from the Maya team had done with Nucleus a number of years ago.
From the article in Science Magazine:
Suzana Herculano-Houzel and Bruno Mota—a neuroscientist and physicist, respectively, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil—have found a mathematical relation for folding in mammals' brains that appears to be universal.
It may sound complicated, but that universal relationship is the same one that describes crumpled wads of paper—as Herculano-Houzel showed by scrunching up sheets of paper of different sizes and thickness at her dining room table and measuring their surface areas. The relationship comes about because the bent-up paper settles into the configuration that minimizes its energy. So presumably, in folding, the cortex also simply settles into the configuration of least mechanical energy.
Duncan Brinsmead says, "The process of crumpling based on surface area in a confined space is what we are simulating. However there are a lot of subtle effects that probably make our result differ."
Jos Stam adds, "It is a qualitative demonstration of the theory described in the paper. The cool thing is that Nucleus is able to show the process and the resulting shape. The brain, like a walnut, is an emergent form from basic constraints. That is what Nucleus is all about."
Here's what the Nucleus simulation in Maya looks like:
Have you ever read a Ph.D. thesis in the form of a comic book? Now you can thanks to the creative mind of Rubaiat Habib. Rubaiat created the interactive illustration and animation tools Draco and Kitty with his colleagues from the Autodesk Research UI Group. In his thesis, Rubaiat discusses Designing New Digital Art Media through the non-traditional format of a comic book.
In this comic, Rubaiat gets into his motivation and process for creating such tools and offers inspiration for all researchers, UX designers and software developers. Beyond that, it's a great read and you can have a taste of it below!
The CHI conference showcases the very best advances in computer science, cognitive psychology, design, social science, human factors, artificial intelligence, graphics, visualization, multi-media design and more is approaching with Autodesk participating both as a proud sponsor and presenter. The theme for CHI 2015 is "Crossings": crossing borders, crossing boundaries, crossing disciplines, crossing people and technology, crossing past and future, crossing physical and digital, crossing art and science, … crossing you and me.
This year Autodesk Research has three papers receiving Honorable Mentions (the top 5% of all submissions):
Fraser Anderson, Tovi Grossman, Daniel Wigdor (Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto) and George Fitzmaurice look at ways to conceal your usage of mobile devices and stay connected without offending your co-workers.
Madeline Gannon (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh), Tovi Grossman and George Fitzmaurice look at skin based input through augmented reality for new design possibilities.
There has been a longstanding concern within HCI that even though we are accumulating great innovations in the field, we rarely see these innovations develop into products. Our panel brings together HCI researchers from academia and industry who have been directly involved in technology transfer of one or more HCI innovations. They will share their experiences around what it takes to transition an HCI innovation from the lab to the market, including issues around time commitment, funding, resources, and business expertise. More importantly, our panelists will discuss and debate the tensions that we (researchers) face in choosing design and evaluation methods that help us make an HCI research contribution versus what actually matters when we go to market.
Panelists:
Parmit K Chilana, Management Sciences, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
Mary P Czerwinski, Microsoft Research, Redmond, United States
Tovi Grossman, Autodesk Research, Toronto, Canada
Chris Harrison, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States
Ranjitha Kumar, Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, United States
Patrick Baudisch, Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany
Shumin Zhai, Research @ Google, Mountain View, United States
We've had books with pictures in them for hundreds of years. With modern computing powers we can move from static pictures in our PDF documents to dynamic animations and tell a more compelling and understandable story like in this Project Draco example (you may need to download it to see the animation in action and use Adobe Reader X or newer).
As we can see in the video above, there are things to consider when authoring a document with animated figures:
readers should not be burdened with complex UI controls
readers should not be distracted by the animation when reading text.
Of course there are other things to consider when creating animated figures:
Duration: just like with a static figure, keep the animated figure short and concise
File Size: keeping the animations short will reduce file size
Number of Animated Figures: use them sparingly but where important to communicate
Audio: sound can be included but can be very distracting so use only if necessary
In a work of entertainment, like a comic book, publishers may be more free with including animations. When publishing an academic paper or instructional document, beyond showing an animation, here are some of the best places to use an animated figure:
Demonstrating How an Interaction Technique Works
Illustrating Cause and Effect
Contrasting Visual Differences
Visualizing How an Algorithm Works
You can read more about this research and follow our instructions if you want to try it out. Happy publishing!
