Cartoon Design(ID:8503/)Cartoon Animation system devised by Marya Repko at Cambridge in 1970 Images were stored in one file, and scripts in another, while a third operations file coordinated Related languages
References: 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. Extract: Implementation Implementation These requirements were achieved with some exceptions in a program called CARTOON DESIGN. It was implemented at the University Computing Laboratory, Cambridge, on a PDP/7 with a model 340 graphical CRT display with light pen and joystick. The computer has 8K of 18 bit words with paper tape input and output. There was no backing store. A cine camera was interfaced to the computer as a peripheral during the development of CARTOON DESIGN. CARTOON DESIGN is organised in three modes: 1. Draw pictures. 2. Define operations. 3. Script. Each mode contains commands which have control over different sections of the computer store: picture file, operations file, and script file, respectively. The picture file contains vectors and subroutine calls and is constructed with the picture drawing commands. The operations file contains series of actions, or operations. An action operates on a part of the picture file. The operation definition commands build up the operations file. The script file contains a list of the operation names and is built-up with the script commands. The relationship between the files can be seen in Fig. 2. The space for each file is allocated dynamically in store as the user builds up the file with the appropriate commands. Pointers linking the script to the operations and the actions to parts of the picture are independent of the files. Thus, in the fixed amount of core in the PDP/7 the user can control the relative size of each file. For example, a complicated picture would leave room for less operations and script than a simple one. in The Computer Journal 15(4) 1972 view details |