Creating animations using virtual reality ThatcherWorld: a case study

This paper describes the creation of a Western shootout animation for a BBC2 television production. This provides a case study describing the interaction between the TV production team and the animators. The animation was produced by explicitly programming transformations applied to nodes in hierarchical models of simple human characters. A subsequent project has attempted to provide character animation making use of the human body tracking and immersion afforded by virtual reality systems. In the new system a human actor can enter into a virtual environment (VE), act out a role, resulting in a file containing a script. While the script is replayed the actor can enter again into the VE, and interact with the first virtual character, and so on for subsequent replays. The paper describes a first version of this system, and provides a critical examination of the use of VR for creating animations