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ALTHOUGH JUST A prototype, Faloutsos believes his animation program
will one day allow virtual stunt artists to replace their flesh-and-blood
counterparts in performing otherwise deadly feats of derring-do.
“Maybe people will be directing virtual actors, and
we’ll have to give them Oscars too,” Faloutsos mused.
The brief clip is a glimpse into the nascent field of
physics-based animation. The technique, whether used for movies or video
games, strives to create a virtual world consistently guided by the same
physical laws that give order to the real world.
“It’s the Holy Grail of character animation. Everybody wants to do
it, but there’s not a whole lot of it out there right now,” said Damien
Neff, senior artificial intelligence designer for NFL Fever 2002, a
Microsoft video game that makes limited use of the technique. (MSNBC is a
Microsoft - NBC joint venture.) |
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As the technology
matures, real stunt artists have mixed feelings about the impact they
believe it will increasingly have on their craft.
“There’s a positive side and a negative side: To talk positive, it’s
made it safer to do a stunt — you don’t have to lay your neck out on the
line as much as you used to. But it’s taken some cash away also,” said Ben
Scott, a Hollywood stuntman who works on the HBO series “Six Feet
Under.”
Traditionally, animators have relied
on their own talents to draw characters that appear to move
naturally.
Movie studios and game developers
also bank increasingly on libraries of hundreds of stunts amassed by
filming the sensor-studded bodies of real performers.
Those “captured motions” can then be matched to virtual
characters and inserted into movies or games, where they appear real as
they move within environments, like sinking ships or burning buildings,
that could put real actors at risk. |
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Venus reprises its
starring role
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