Presents: Virtual Stop Motion

Inspiration

Virtual Stop Motion (VSM) is way animate characters in a webpage, that anyone can use. Our team, Axum Graphics, is inspired by traditional stop motion animation. Thus, our user experience philosophy honors simplicity and strives to reduce barriers to entry found in many animation programs. Virtual Stop Motion has intuitive user interface that allows anyone to make an animated film.

What it does

VSM renders 3D in the browser and allows filmmakers who have never used a 3D content creation tool before to create animated movies. It is designed to allow users to manipulate and animate 3D characters as if they were physical models.

How we built it

VSM required us to create a custom import pipeline using the library AssImp to import the rigged character model. We then import that character model into the VSM webpage, which is implemented in Webgl using the Three.js framework. The custom animation interface is built using the Three.js intersection code and the inverse kinematics library fullik. The final render is implemented using Cycles production renderer.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into were:

• Processing and loading skinned models
• Designing the 3D interface
• Rendering the final video

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of making a character implementation pipeline from scratch over night

What we learned

Through this project we learned the importance of iterating on user interfaces with real users, particularly 3D user interfaces.

What's next for Virtual Stop Motion?

We would like to build VSM into a full product that can be used to produce all aspects of computer animation and virtual reality.

Built With

• flask
• fullik
• javascript
• python
• three.js