James Smith - Past Work

3D Graphics on the Web

2008-05-09T10:42:00Z

Floppy's Web3D Guide is my website dedicated to helping people get into the world of Web-based 3D graphics. It started out simply as a VRML97 tutorial, but evolved over the years to become one of the more major sites covering the subject, getting over 7500 visitors per month. The site offered the latest industry news, tutorials, code samples, links, software reviews, and plenty more.

The site is currently unavailable due to a loss of the old Vapour Technology server, but I'm hoping to have it back online in the near future.

Vapour Technology

2008-05-09T10:28:00Z

Vapour Technology was a company formed by myself and Warren Moore to develop and commercialise 3d graphics technology, particularly for web-based applications. The company is unfortunately no longer active.

Major clients included BT, for whom we developed game-related applications for their Millennium Dome body scanner, and Ove Arup & Associates, for whom we developed visualisation software for structural simulations. We also developed various end-user 3D applications which allowed users to pose, animate, and modify human avatar models.

Scanned Avatars in games

We created software tools to convert scanned Avatar-Me human body models into popular game formats. We created converters for:

Unreal Tournament
Halflife
The Sims

The three games all have radically different demands and animation methods, so detailed character animation knowledge was required to reverse engineer the formats, and then convert the models into those formats so they could be used in-game. The Unreal Tournament conversion, for instance, required that we create over 700 unique keyframes for the animations, which in turn involved developing our own set of in-house animation and posing tools. In the case of The Sims, we had to perform some automatic remodelling of the character models, in order to blend them into the game style as much as possible.

We also created an installation system that would install the models into the correct place for the game to find them automatically, requiring no user intervention at all.

Avatar Animation Tools

We were asked to develop an end-user animation tool to allow people to manipulate their Avatar-Me avatars. We created a tool to do this, which was designed to be as simple as possible to use. Beta testers were chosen who had no experience with computers at all, so that the interface could be honed to an extremely intuitive design.

Features included:

Constrained Inverse Kinematics, for easy posing of the avatar.
Load and save animation sequences.
AVI export.
Scaling and resizing.
Export to popular game formats

Unfortunately, due to a change in business model of the client, the project was shelved before it's release. The application lived on however, becoming a valuable internal tool for the company's other character animation projects, including the game converters above.

VRML Toolbox

Recently, we released some of the old Vapour Technology VRML97 tools as open source software. The tools are specialised calculators for helping VRML97 content creators, written in C++ and MFC. Windows only at the moment, I'm afraid! Source code and downloads are available from Google Code.

PhD Research

2008-05-09T10:18:00Z

In 2003, I obtained my PhD in the field of 3D computer graphics from the CVSSP at the University of Surrey over the last 5 years.

The summary of the thesis is as follows:

Creation of 3D graphical content becomes ever harder, as both display capabilities and the demand for complex 3D content increase. In this thesis, we present a method of using densely scanned surface data from physical objects in interactive animation systems. By using a layered approach, incorporating skeletal animation and displacement mapping, we can realistically animate complex datasets with a minimum of manual intervention.
We propose a method using three layers; firstly, an articulated skeleton layer provides simple motion control of the object. Secondly, a low-polygon control layer, based on the scanned surface, is mapped to this skeleton, and animated using a novel geometric skeletal animation method. Finally, the densely sampled surface mesh is mapped to this control layer using a normal volume mapping, forming the detail layer of the system. This mapping allows animation of the dense mesh data based on deformation of the control layer beneath. The complete layered animation chain allows an animator to perform interactive animation using the control layer, the results of which can then be used to automatically animate a highly detailed surface for final rendering.
We also propose an extension to this method, in which the detail layer is replaced by a displacement map defined over the control layer. This enables dynamic level of detail rendering, allowing realtime rendering of the dense data, or an approximation thereof. This representation also supports such applications as simple surface editing and compression of surface data. We describe a novel displacement map creation technique based on normal volume mapping, and analyse the performance and accuracy of this method.

You can download the full thesis below.

H-Anim 2001

As part of my PhD research I worked on efficient skeletal animation techniques. One of the ways in which we tested those techniques was to extend the existing H-Anim 1.1 specification for VRML character animation to allow seamless animation using our technique. This was presented in the Seamless VRML Humans paper in 2000.

After SIGGRAPH 2001, the H-Anim group decided to create a new version of the specification, H-Anim 2001, to allow seamless models. I was involved in the creation of the new standard, which was a fusion of our method and a number of others.

Prometheus

I also wrote a character animation library for the Prometheus Project. The project was to create technology for virtual studios and actors between the BBC, BTExact, Avatar-Me, the CVSSP at Surrey, and more.

The library provided all the basic functionality required by the project, and formed a base on which the new technologies could be built. It included such functionality as plug-in character animation engines, as well as facial animation support and a basic renderer. I wasn't involved in the project after writing the library, but it continued to be used until the end of the project by many of the commercial partners.

Past Work

2008-05-08T09:49:00Z

Before venturing into field of socially responsible software, I worked on a number of other interesting projects, mainly in the field of 3D graphics.