Computer animation in interior and industrial design

Abstract

Traditionally, designers communicate their designs to other designers, architects and clients through drawings and models. Both these methods are reasonable compromises to having to build a prototype but are severely limiting and inflexible. Representing a design by a set of drawings has a number of disadvantages. Designers, engineers or architects frequently have problems in understanding fully the three-dimensional implications of a design before it is built or manufactured. Although they are all trained to think in three dimensions their primary means of communication is in terms of two-dimensional orthographic projections, such as plans and elevations. Interpretation of such drawings is frequently ambiguous and thus may lead to expensive mistakes in the construction or manufacture process. When communicating a design to a client, a designer may resort to more realistic, but also more expensive, drawing representations such as axonometric, oblique or perspective projections. Frequently the client may wish to view the product or interior from a different angle or with a different degree of detail, in which case new drawings must be made at considerable cost in terms of time and money. Constructing a model of the proposed product or interior again has a number of disadvantages. It is very costly, especially if the model has moving parts, and it is usually difficult to modify a part of the model without having to rebuild the entire model. Frequently models are unsatisfactory as they cannot be viewed at the appropriate scale and in the case of interiors and buildings it is difficult, if not impossible, to move through them in order to understand and appreciate their architectural space and evaluate the spatial relationship of the design. The majority of these problems can be overcome by using geometric modelling and computer animation techniques. Construction of a computer model of a product, interior or building allows the designer to quickly evaluate, modify and reevaluate his/her design in a progressive refinement cycle, thus leading to better and more cost-effective designs. Once the model is built, the designer can, through computer animation techniques, walk around a proposed product or interior, simulate the movement of any moving parts of the model, experiment with different colouring and lighting schemes, perfect the design and finally produce presentation quality renderings and animated sequences demonstrating the functionality of the design. Final year interior and industrial design students have been doing just that, at Teesside Polytechnic, using the CGAL animation environment. Figures 1, 2 and 3 are sample frames from a walk through sequence by Julie Thompson. Her final project involved a conversion of the Middlesbrough's Old Town Hall into a combined Urban Studied Center and Community Library. Figures 4, 5 and 6 are sample frames from a walk through sequence by Chris Hines. His final project involved the remodelling of spaces within Commerce House, an old Victorian building in Middlesbrough. Figures 7, 8 and 9 are sample frames from a walk through sequence by Glenn Allen Johnson and Matthew Gerard Wright. They both worked on a joint Living Room project for which they designed a television set, a set of speakers, an audio-visual control unit, a gas fire, a settee and a lighting unit. All the animated sequences were generated using the GCAL animation environment which has also been successfully used for the production of a number of animated sequences for television. The animation environment consists of the CGAL animation system and the CGAL # l animation language. The system is the animators' tool kit, which comprises of an animation language, object modelling tools, movement definition tools, a lighting set, a camera and various image synthesis and playback facilities. The animation language forms the core of the system and provides the animator with a precise and elegant way of anotating 3D computer animated sequences which in turn can be translated into a series of frames by the animation system. CGAL stands for Computer Graphics and Animation Language. In the tradition of modern high level languages, like LOGO, CGAL is not just an animation language but it provides a system environment, This environment is a user friendly universe in which the animator can experiment with colour, space and movement. In this environment the user can generate three dimensional scenes and subsequently develop, debug, execute and playback scripts for 3D colour animation. The CGAL system provides the user with a work space, a program script editor, an incremental script compiler and a script interpreter. The language used to communicate with the system, called CGAL #1, is a high level procedural language, which is conversational, attribute examining, and provides the user with extensive polygon and object generation and manipulation capabilities.