Vizzers animate virtual characters with San Jose State counterparts

[Master of Science in Visualization] (http://www.arch.tamu.edu/prospective/graduate/#MS-VisualizationScience) students at Texas A&M and their counterparts at San Jose State University in California are collaborating in a virtual classroom this spring to create three dimensional, animated characters.

“Most of the models are designed in a fanciful style similar to characters found in animated feature films and video games,” said Tim McLaughlin, head of Texas A&M’s [Department of Visualization] (http://viz.arch.tamu.edu/) . He’s co-leading the two groups of students with Raquel Coelho, SJSU assistant professor of animation/illustration. “All of the characters for this project are bipedal, meaning they will move in a human-like way, though with degrees of abstraction or realism as defined by the animators,” said McLaughlin.

Students at both universities will be able to use the characters, which are being created by widely available software, for future projects.

McLaughlin and Coelho are using Skype to teach the class, and students at the two campuses are using blogs and Google Docs to keep information flowing between them.

The characters, designed and modeled by SJSU students, are being rigged — given a “skeletal” system that governs a character’s motion — by Aggie animators, with input and feedback from their SJSU counterparts.

“Part of the challenge for the Texas A&M students is to engineer the rig in a way that facilitates the style of animation desired,” said McLaughlin.

The project, he said, is part of a larger effort to increase opportunities for Aggie Vizzers to collaborate with partners who are not on campus.

“Because the industries that utilize computer graphics continue to find talent in worldwide locations, our students need to develop the capacity to undertake creative problem solving with a distant partner,” he said.

In an ongoing, similar project, Texas A&M undergraduate visualization students are collaborating with counterparts at the University of Texas at Dallas, Aggies studying abroad in [Bonn] (http://www.arch.tamu.edu/academics/study-abroad/study-abroad-program/germany/) , Germany and high school students at the Design and Technology Academy in San Antonio.

“As long as it appears these efforts are proving to be effective components to their broader education, I will continue to look for more opportunities for inter-institutional collaboration in student projects,” said McLaughlin.