Questions on “Digital Humans Wait in the Wings" Handout  from Scientific American

due Wed. 11-28-01

Email to Mr. Rummel

1. Distinguish between digital cel animation and complete CG animation.

2. Compare Moore’s law about Transistors to the evolution of polygons/ second in the last decade of film animation.

3. What variables influence the # of polygons/ frame required to make “reality”?

4. How are avatars currently created in CG movies like “Hollow man”?
   a. What image processing features are probably being used in the green screen process or in the sequence of composited frames shown in “The Perfect Storm” on p. 75 of the article?

5. What is a pixel in 3D space called?
   a. In general, how does it get manipulated to create the animation and perspective     changes?

6. What is matrix concatenation? If it takes such a long time to do this, why bother creating the resulting transform matrix? 

7. What were the rendering times per frame in Toy Story 2 for both simple polygon and then more complex polygon scenes. What do these rendering times have to do with transform matrices? Please speculate.