Character Essences

This is an ongoing personal project, which has expanded into research. I aim to capture the essence of a character’s movement by observation of real people and animals and to recreate similar effects in custom virtual characters and creatures. The project revolves around understanding how complex movement is created in the body from simple motion qualities. To achieve this, Laban Motion Analysis (LMA) techniques will be employed, to study effort, shape, space and phrasing of creature and character behaviour.

Once the component parts of movement have been established, a process of adapting the movement code from observation will be done onto virtual characters or creatures. Procedural animation techniques will be used to automate the process, rendering unique motions, behaviours and emotions. Using simple maths rather than motion datasets allows the flexibility of creating multiple types of personalities from the virtual characters, beyond the limit of a dataset. 

Here is a toy research post and video on creating funny duck walks in Maya with Python.

Le Quack Walker V1.0

CAVE Animation Jam

Our BSc Computer Animation and VFX course, in collaboration with BA Animation (SODA) run CAVE Animation Jams at the end of every January (since 2022). We combine the skills of technical and artistic students and help them create unique short films during a week where there is no teaching or assessments. Industry talks, workshops and feedback have been part of the programs so far, to encourage students on the professional path. Each event ends in an awards ceremony and drinks afterwards. The feedback so far has been great so we intend to continue the jam for the foreseeable future.

Here is the link to our twitter page where we’ll continue to post updates from our animation jams:

CAVE Animation Jam

BSc Computer Animation and VFX Course

• 6G4Z0027 3D Fundamentals (2021 - ) Unit Lead since 2023
• 6G5Z0036 Modelling (2022 - ) Unit Lead
• 6G5Z0037 Rigging (2022 - ) Unit Lead 
• 6G6Z0033 Innovation in VFX (2024 - ) Unit Lead
• 6G5Z2109 3D Character Development (2019 - 2022) Unit Lead
• 6G6Z2108 Character Animation Techniques (2019 - 2023) Unit Lead

SODA Game Art and Design Courses

• 6G4Z0027 3D Fundamentals (2021 - ) Unit Lead since 2023

MA Animation

• Exploration in CG (2022 - ) Unit Lead

My main R&D interests​ are in different forms of expressing character animation: procedural, behavioral (Laban motion analysis, emergence theory, AI etc) and physics based, movement and pattern analysis, mesh reconstruction and deformation, expressing emotions, humour and other human behaviours through abstract movement (automata) and mathematical functions. 

Research Gate Link

Papers

[1] Anamaria Ciucanu, Naval Bhandari, Xiaokun Wu,Shridhar Ravikumar, Yong-Liang Yang,Darren Cosker. (2018). E-StopMotion: Digitizing StopMotion for Enhanced Animation and Games. In MIG 18: Motion, Interaction and Games(MIG18), Nov. 8-10, 2018, Limassol. ACM,NY, 11 pages.

[2] Anamaria Ciucanu, Alina Dănilă, Paul Nechifor, Adrian Iftene. (2010). Detectarea vandalismului pe Wikipedia (Detecting Vandalism on Wikipedia).7th National Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (RoCHI 2010), pages 143-144, Bucharest.

[3] Daniela Dumbrava, Georgiana Carausu. (2010). Nicolae Milescu’s Iter in Chinam (1676). Visual, computational and encyclopaedic reconstructions. CLARIN. A European Research Structure, Newsletter, Sep 1, 2010.

Conference Commitees

2nd Annual ECR and PhD conference committee member