Recent Projects

Le Quack Walker V1.0

Link: Read post here

This project started as a question: What is it that makes ducks funny? Moreover, I wanted to know if there was a code behind the movement of a funny duck. Rather than attempting to understand everything at once, I chose a simple behaviour, walking, and investigated its “funny” potential. Since emotions are also seen among laughing people, they were chosen as nuances for the walking behaviour.

Procedural animation was used on a duck rig prototype to create a palette of stylized walk cycles. People were then asked to name the emotions they thought each duck walk expressed and also if they found them funny. This work is part of the Character Essences project, which focuses on recreating believable actions using procedural animation.

Character Essences

Link: Read post here After a few years of improv theatre, animation research and coding I think it’s time to begin my dream project. Character Essences will combine theatre techniques of character creation with traditional and procedural animation. Drawing on character archetypes from Commedia dell’arte and the physical theatre methods of Jacque le Coque and Rudolf Laban, the main focus is to find movement parameters (constants and variables) that define well established characters.

E – StopMotion

Link: Read post here Digitizing stop motion animation has been my Engineering Doctorate project between 2014 and 2018. The aim was to simplify the workload for artists and offer them tools to bring their handmade creations in a 3D game. The following video shows a simple pipeline for digitizing characters from the game Clay Jam, by Fat Pebble. This is now published work and open for film and game companies to use. Publications [1] Anamaria Ciucanu, Naval Bhandari, Xiaokun Wu, Shridhar Ravikumar​, Yong-Liang Yang, Darren Cosker. 2018. E-StopMotion: Digitizing Stop Motion for Enhanced Animation and Games. In MIG 18: Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG 18), November 8-10, 2018, Limassol, Cyprus. ACM, New York, USA, 11 pages.  [PDF]

Robin Animator V1.0

Link: Read post here The Robin Animator V1.0 is a Maya plugin written in python for animation prototyping. It can be used to generate basic procedural animations of little bird characters. These animations can then be exported for your games, rendered in your films or can serve as reference for more complex animations. The code and Maya file are available on GitHub. 

Experience

• Research skills in shape deformation, registration and analysis
• Research skills in movement analysis
• Analytical thinking and planning
• Problem solving
• Academic writing
• Procedural animation
• C/C++, C# (Unity), Java
• Python, Matlab
• OpenGL/WebGL
• JavaScript/Three JS, Processing
• HTML5, CSS3

Teaching 

• Lecturer in 3D Character Development (Character design, modelling, texturing)
• Lecturer in Character Animation Techniques (Rigging/Animation basics)
• Lab tutor for Principles of Programming 1
• Lab tutor for Fundamentals of Computer Graphics
• Lab tutor for Intelligent Control and Cognitive Systems

Education

• EngD Computer Animation at Bath University, within the Centre for Digital Entertainment, Bath (2013 – Feb 2019)
• MSc Computer Animation and Visual Effects at Bournemouth University, Bournemouth (2011 – 2012)
• BSc Computer Science at the Faculty of Computer Science Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Iasi (2008 – 2011)