Few people can truly appreciate the patience and dedication that computer animators must have in order to do what they are paid to do. Upon hearing of the animation option for the final project of this course, I decided that I would like the opportunity to attempt the animation of human figures, and what is better than sports to show the movements of humans? My love for the sport of volleyball made my choice easy, but I did not realize the lofty goals that I had set out for myself. My first decision was to use Poser4 as the application with which to animate the volleyball game. The focus of this project was solely to create realistic movements of the human figures. Poser4 provides the user with numerous human figures to choose from, so there was no need to model the figures in this animation. Unfortunately Poser4 does not have the capabilities to create backgrounds for the animated world and due to the time constraints of the animation process there was no time to create a suitable beach background. A brief attempt was made to import a background using Bryce4 but there was difficulties encountered in trying to animate the Bryce4 background with the human figures.

    The action begins with the serve in a rally point set. This means that whoever wins the next point earns a point in the score. The red team is ready to serve the ball and the black team is ready to recieve the ball. The current score is 14 to 13 for the black team meaning that it is now match point for the black team. The left side player of the red team serves the ball using a jump serve, to the left side player of the black team. The pass is made to the right side player who sets the ball for the leftside player. The ball is set off the net to give the left side player time to get to the set. The left side player hits the ball down the line six-packing the right side player of the black team. But, as fortune would have it, the right side player's face saves the ball and allows his team mate to chase it out of bounds. The ball is then set for the right side player of the black team who hits the ball right into the waiting block of the red team's leftside player. When the ball hits the ground the red team falls to the ground in defeat while the black team begins to celebrate.

    There are four characters used in this animation. For simplicity, beach volleyball was chosen over indoor volleyball because there are only four players involved and they wear less clothing. In this animation there are eight figures used; the four players and their shorts. There are two teams, the red team and the black team.

	The left-side player of the black team.
	The right-side player of the black team.
	The left-side player of the red team.
	The right-side player of the red team.

    In order to create the movements of each of the players, I created every fourth frame and allowed Poser to tween the two frames in between. This allowed for greater control of the movements of the characters. Details such as finger and toe movements were included to add to the realism of the action. Poser4 has predefined hand positions which were used, such as a pointing hand or a hand making a fist. There are also various facial expressions that are predefined that were used to express joy, fear, and anger.

	The right-side player of the black team jump-setting the ball.
	The left-side player of the black team hitting the ball down the line from power
	The right-side player of the red team showing fear as the left-side player of the black team jumps up to spike the ball.
	The left-side player of the black team showing an evil smile and taunting the red team player that he just six-packed.
	The right-side player of the red team as he is six-packed.
	The right-side player of the red team as he is knocked down from the six-pack.
	The left-side player of the red team digs the ball.
	The right-side hitter of the red team is blocked by the left-side player of the black team.
	The agony of defeat.

    Since the point of this project was to animate human figures and the tedious animation process created time constraints, only a basic background was used in this world. The limited capabilities of Poser4 with respect to the creation of bacgrounds, did not allow for the creation of a detailed beach scene as originally planned. Therefore, a basic sand coloured ground was used as well as a light blue background to represent the sky. Except for the human figures provided by Poser4, the beach volleyball net was the only other model used. The net is made up of three squares and four cylinders primitives. The material of the square was altered to be semi-transparent which serendipitously created a material similar to a net. The two other squares manipulated to form the top and bottom tapes of the net. The remaining primitive objects were simply resized to create the two net posts and the two antennae.

The net using seven primitive objects found in Poser4.

    For this project, Poser4 from the PC lab was used to animate the four players and MovieMaker from the SGI lab was used to add sound and edit the 23 clips used in the final cut of the animation. Poser 4 is an incredible application for animating human movements. The pre-made figures provided by Poser are highly detailed and allow for a level of control that make realistic movements possible. The controls seemed strange at first, but after a period of trial and error, one could see how the ability of any user to manipulate the smallest details, such as the three sections of each finger, are necessary to achieve the realism of a figure's movements.

    Extreme ambition, forced the creation of thirty clips using different camera angles. In the final cut of the "Match Point" animation only twenty-three of these clips were actually used. MovieMaker is the program that was used to edit the final cut of the animation. It is a very useful program in that it made the "gluing" of the individual clips and the addition of sound effects very easy. Unfortunately the compression algorithm chosen to create the final cut didn't work as well as expected and created a file that was much too large for any kind of practical use.

    Along with the problems encountered with importing backgrounds from Bryce4 and the intrinsic problems in attempting to recreate human movement, there were also problems in compressing the final cuts of the animation. In total there are twenty-three clips using various camera angles and sounds that make up the final cut. These clips take many hours to render and once again, the time constraint did not allow for the experimentation of using different compression algorithms in the MovieMaker program in the SGI labs. In total the final cut of this animation is about twenty-eight seconds long, but reached a whopping 315MB. Because of the enormous size of the final cut, there is also a much smaller rendering of the entire animation without the movie effects, and using a static camera angle. It is also rendered in a 240 X 180 window, unlike the final cut that used a 400 X 250 window. The larger window was used to accomodate the lateral movement of most of the action in this animation.

    In working on this project, I gained a true understanding of the type of dedication required to be a computer animator. Almost all the production time of this animation went into the fine tuning of the movements of all the human characters as well as the movement of the ball.