CAMPER(ID:7911/)for Computer Aided Movie Perspectives 3d version of CAMP Implemented on the ICL computer at ACL in the UK Related languages
Samples: References: in [AFIPS] Proceedings of the 1967 Fall Joint Computer Conference FJCC 31 view details in Proc. Computer Graphics Symposium, Brunel University 1970 view details Background Reports of efforts to produce animated films with computers date from as long ago as 1964 (Knowlton, 1964). The attendance at the recent symposium at the Atlas Computer Laboratory in Chilton, Berkshire, on computer animation demonstrates that interest in this technique is prevalent among a wide spectrum of professionals : educationalists, animators of films for entertainment, scientists, and computer graphics programmers. The papers and discussions at the symposium showed that progress towards practical computer-aided animation has not advanced considerably since its inception. Most activity has been in filming mathematical functions for teaching mathematics or science. The best known example of this is the Bell Telephone Laboratories film 'Space, Time and Motion', demonstrating the inverse power law over two moving bodies. More recently, in England, the Open University has been sponsoring the development of films for helping to teach the concepts of interpolation and the Nuffield Foundation Science Teaching Project has been involved with computer produced films for demonstrating statistical mechanics at atomic level. In the area of less specialised graphics, only a few of the many plotting packages have been designed for the film animator. One of these is CAMP (Computer Animated Motion Pictures), with its three-dimensional partner CAMPER (Hopgood and Ralphs, 1971). The program uses fixed-format data on cards to draw pictures, perform transformations on them, and output them. There is no hidden line suppression in CAMPER. Instructions for drawing geometrical shapes as well as electrical symbols are provided. One unique feature is the clock, or meter, drawing facility. In the UK at the Atlas Computer Laboratory in Chilton, GROATS (Graphic Output Package for Atlas using The SC 4020) (Hopgood, 1969) has been written for the Atlasl anda Stromberg-Carlson microfilm recorder. The package is an extension of ALGOL and provides procedures for drawing curves and alphanumeric characters, for transforming them, for windowing or blanking-out parts of a frame, for shading, and for preparing a magnetic tape for input to the SC 4020. A film available from the Atlas Laboratory demonstrates that the package is quite powerful. Although these systems have useful graphics capabilities, they are not conducive to the free designing techniques that the artist is accustomed to with pencil and paper. Graphic data is meaningless to human eyes in digital form. A sneak preview of a film showing some development work at IBM in New York indicates that a system using a 360 computer with a 2250 graphical CRT display and Rand-type tablet is being designed for drawing and animating pictures. ACIANS (Artist Gomputer Interactive Animation System) allows the user to draw pictures, store themTcal1 theG up, define movements and combine foreground and background pictures. An interactive system using a PDP/I5 with graphic CRT display and tablet is being developed at the Atlas Computer Laboratory. It is intended that sequences of animation can be previewed and edited before being filmed on the SC 4020 and will be a useful extension of the work already done there in animation. Anderson (1971) has adapted CAMP and CAMPER for interactive use on a CRT. Using a function keyboard, the user can step through frames of animation. The editing procedure involves changing the card images that define the pictures. A digitiser off-line relieves the tedium of coding the original cards. in The Computer Journal 15(4) 1972 view details INTRODUCTION CAMPER (Computer Aided Movie Perspectives) is a program designed and implemented by Sherwood Anderson as part of his MSc Dissertation at Syracuse University. The aim was to produce an efficient picture language for producing computer animated films. This manual derives from a number of papers available on the system (see references at end). CAMPER is a 3D extension of a 2D system called CAMP. No knowledge of computer programming languages is required. The user produces a set of data cards where each card is a statement in a very simple language. each data card contains all the relevant information needed to describe a particular figure or to perform some operation upon a previously defined figure. The card format consists of a maximum of five letters defining the command followed by a group of numbers located in the appropriate card columns which specify the arguments of the command. the language is planned so that a potential user can quickly design and produce films without guidance. Extract: BASIC PHILOSOPHY BASIC PHILOSOPHY The basic philosophy is to approximate all picture elements in the film by straight lines. Although curved regions of the figure may suffer, there is considerable economy and simplicity because of this. Only the coordinates of the endpoints of each line are stored. A simple storage structure is used to keep complex pictures in a fairly compact form. Using this, the same picture can be produced repeatedly without wasting time regenerating the points defining each frame. If the user wishes to change only certain parts of a figure, he can easily do so by altering only those points in question in the storage structure. The storage area is broken down into a number of distinct parts called stacks. Each new figure is added at the end of a stack when it is defined. the individual figures are called arrays. A single command can either operate on a single array or a whole stack. Arrays are numbered and care must be taken to generate them sequentially. For example, a circle might be defined as array 1 in stack 1. this could be followed by a definition of a triangle as array 2 of stack 1 and so on. Arrays can be processed in any order once generated. the contents of an array can be replaced by a second figure providing that it requires the same number of locations (see the Appendix). The 1906A version of CAMPER has an 8000 word area of store defined as 8 stacks of 1000 words. in The Computer Journal 15(4) 1972 view details |