![]() “There’s something magical about taking a flat picture and making it The idea of transforming static 2D artwork into interactive, dynamic content,” Li saw the promise of the project early on. An early full-length film example of this 3D work was inĢ002’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, where an actor’s motionīy contrast, the Adobe effort sought to democratize a streamlined form of facial motion tracking for 2D artists and animators. However, that approach was expensive and driven by Li explains that motion capture for 3D animation has beenĪround for years. When the team began, they were taking a page from previous Mainstream products for performance-based 2D animation,” he explains. “The entire system is innovative, since there were no Original warping engine with collaborators. Who moved into APD’s space in the Seattle office’s first floor to work out the “There was no blueprint, so we had to invent one,” says Popović, Their goal was to create a completely new tool that could seamlessly take 2D art from Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator and turn it into an animated character that could be controlled by a performer being motion-tracked in real time. The group began a multi-year project that brought them What they did not yet know was that this informal exchange would lead to a brand-new product, Adobe Character Animator, and that this product-fast-forwarding to 2020-would be recognized with a technical Emmy Award for its contributions to television. They knew they could find a way to make character animation easier for Adobe’s creative customers. Others soon joined the effort, including Li from Adobe Research and Daniel Wilk and James Acquavella from APD. Popović brainstormed potential directions with Simons and his team. Over lunch, Simons says, “a plan started to come together.” “Folks in the APD group were seeing lots of customers having a tough time trying to use After Effects to rig complicated characters, so we started to formulate a plan to bring character animation to a wider audience,” recalls David Simons, an Adobe Fellow who leads APD. Their work, and related advances in machine learning, highlighted the possibility of animating through speaking and acting performance alone.ĪPD team members were well aware of animation pain points for users. Popović collaborated on techniques for animation with physics or human performances (body, face, and hands) and on techniques for doing so quickly on any artwork. Li had developed methods for converting three-dimensional or two-dimensional artwork into interactive diagrams. Team-had independently been considering what they could do to help.Īt Adobe Research, Wilmot (Wil) Li, a Principal Scientist, and Jovan Popović, an Adobe Fellow, were inventing technologies for transforming static drawings into interactive media. Two groups-one from Adobe Research, and the other from theĪdvanced Product Development (APD) group in Adobe’s Digital Video & Audio Hard to make their 2D characters come to life with existing tools. The topic was an issue that kept coming up for Adobe customers: It was It began as a lunchtime conversation at the Adobe café in By Meredith Alexander Kunz, Adobe Research ![]()
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