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Digital visualization tools improve teaching 3D character modeling

Published: 10 March 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Many Universities are building interdisciplinary programs that overlap engineering and fine art departments that focus on games, special effects, animation and other forms of interdisciplinary efforts. With increasing demands for education linking the Engineering Sciences and Fine Arts, fueled by the competitive nature of the industries that recruit graduates, educators need to become more efficient and effective in their task of educating engineering and art majors in cross-disciplinary courses.
CS3650 at the University of Utah is a digital character production course. This course is interdisciplinary and draws from several disciplines including computer science, graphics, anatomy, sculpture, art, and entertainment. It is a prerequisite for our machinima class, which immerses students into 3D game engines. Visualization tools are used in the course to help students learn to create better digital models.
Presented in this paper is an experimental comparison between traditional visualization tools and digital visualization tools, which are less expensive, easier to distribute, arrange/procure and transport than the traditional tools. Traditional visualization tools include lifelike skeleton reproductions, wooden body mass structures, actual live human models, and anatomy drawing books. The digital visualization tools that are contrasted in this paper are: a layered anatomically correct, digital human model (skin, muscles, masses and some bones adapted from several sources) and a VisTrails version of a properly produced human figure (interactive animation). The digital tools are used to replace the traditional visualization tools used in the same educational curriculum, which teaches students to design, model and produce digital characters for games, machinima, and animation. The quantitative experiment demonstrates that digital visualization tools help to improve a student's understanding of the complex software packages used to produce characters, helps to improve specific techniques used to model 3D characters, and it helps to improve understanding of 3D form, more than the traditional tools within the context of this educational curriculum.

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Kessler, R. van Langeveld, M. and Altizer, R. 2009 Entertainment Arts and Engineering (or How to Fast Track A New Interdisciplinary Program). Proceedings of the 40th SIGCSE (Mar. 09). ACM, USA, 539--543.
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SIGCSE Bulletin, "Ucigame, A Java Library for Games", University of California, Irvine - Frost, 2008
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Leutenegger, S. and Edington, J. 2007, A Games First Approach to Teaching Introductory Programming. In Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE (Mar. 07). ACM, USA, 115--118.
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van Langeveld, M. and Kessler, R. 2009 Two in the Middle: Digital Character Production and Machinima Courses. Proceedings of the 40th SIGCSE (Mar. 09). ACM, USA, 463--467.
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van Langeveld, M., Educational Impact of Digital Visualization Tools on Digital Character Production Computer Science Courses, Dissertation-Univ. of Utah, 2009

Cited By

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  • (2015)A flexible platform for the creation of 3D semi-immersive environments to teach Cultural HeritageDigital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage10.1016/j.daach.2015.11.0022:4(248-259)Online publication date: 2015

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2010
618 pages
ISBN:9781450300063
DOI:10.1145/1734263
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 March 2010

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Author Tags

  1. 3d character modeling
  2. anatomy
  3. digital entertainment industry
  4. education
  5. form
  6. instructional technologies
  7. interdisciplinary curriculum
  8. machinima
  9. video games
  10. visualization

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  • (2015)A flexible platform for the creation of 3D semi-immersive environments to teach Cultural HeritageDigital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage10.1016/j.daach.2015.11.0022:4(248-259)Online publication date: 2015

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