Research Of Shadowgraph-style Animation

Chinese art of Shadowgraph, which originated from the background of Chinese traditional culture, is an integrated folk art with a quite long history. As an immemorial and unique form of art that is widely appealed by the folks, shadowgraph is not only popularized on the civil level nationally, but also has a considerably wide coverage and profound mass base internationally. "Peach-Blossom Spring", a shadow animation domestically produced in 2006, won the Best Excellence Award on the TBS DIGICON AWARD, while, with both great artistic values and economic values, the two global big-hits of "Panda", in which the Shadowgraph-style sections made a deep impression on the audience, tell a significant truth to all once again that the national is the global. As Chinese culture speedily spread internationally, digital animation with Chinese elements or Chinese tradition-artistic style is facing comprehensively magnificent developing opportunities by fully taking advantages of such "Sinomania" worldwide,.In this paper, we would try best to explore a way to "create shadow animation through the methods of digital animation technology".3D animation technology enables us to explore the ways to exhibit the traditional art elements by exploiting the digital animation technology, to analyze the artistic features of the traditional shadowgraph on character modeling, scene layouts, dramatically stylized action-drama, background music and so on. Also,3D animation technology makes it possible to produce the 3D shadow animation "Beheading Cai Yang" in the digital animation production process with a series of animation production links of modeling, rendering, skeleton charactering, animation adjustment.How to transform shadow characters more three-dimensional and to rig shadow character skeletons when producing the 3D shadow animation "Beheading Cai Yang" are mainly discussed in this paper. The three-dimensional modeling of characters is to have the vector image outlined and imported into Maya to be converted into a thick nurbs model, before it being modified into polygon model for further characterization. Shading of character modeling is to endow the character-relevant material balls with the already-made maps through the UV model. Every shadow character needs an independent and characterized skeleton system for assistance to realize its motor functions. By utilizing the skeletal system of Maya and the rigging style that is mutually effected by SK/IK/FK Skeletal system, character modeling rigging is able to be accomplished with differentiated constrain and rigging patterns based on their various characteristics of motion, during the process of which some simple order of rigging could be written by Mel Language of Maya. Meanwhile, a whole set of specific design of conversion mode has been made, including Mel Language, transfer switch and application method in the animation production, in order to make it available for the flexible switch between IK motion system and FK motion system.