Theorized Work for Adapting the Principles of Animation to Virtual
Reality as a New Form of Narrative for 3D Animation
André Salomão, Milton Luiz Horn Vieira
a
, Nicolas C. Romeiro and Victor Nassar
b
DesignLab, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, R. Roberto Sampaio Gonzaga, 274, Florianópolis, Brazil
Keywords: Virtual Reality, 3D Animation, Principles of Animation.
Abstract: In this paper, we will for starters, introduce the basics concepts of virtual reality, how it works, which its
upsides and downsides are, followed by the contextualization of the twelve principles of animation then we
open a discussion about how we can adapt it for the media of virtual reality. The goal of this research is to
create a discussion about the utilization of virtual reality as a new form of narrative for third-dimensional
animation and how we can improve the adaptation of standard animation concepts to a new form of media.
1 INTRODUCTION
Due to the success of productions, producers might
look for new ways to increase the reach of their
products, like redesigning it to another type of media
beyond the traditional ones like cinema or television.
This is the transmedia process that happens when the
source of the content is explored in another type of
media, like going from comics to movies or games
(Jenkins, 2007).
Nowadays there are multiple examples of
transmedia, we see it in products like Harry Potter,
with books being transformed into movies, Lord of
the Rings having its source material, the books, being
turned into oscar-winning movies. But a book to the
screens isn’t the only form of transmedia, Harry
Potter has also been delivered to the world of games,
the same we can speak about Lord of the Rings, and
in the case of games, the user stops passively
interacting with the source material and starts being a
piece of the interactive narrative.
One of the recent technological advancements is
the fact we are utilizing virtual reality hardware as a
new type of media. This technology creates a mental
immersion on the user, putting them inside a
simulation, or a virtual world (Sherman; Craig, 2003).
Not only games and traditional media content are
being adapted to virtual reality, but also applications
for training in medicine (Machado et al., 2011; Soares
a
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6646-2799
b
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9986-9405
et al., 2014; Vaughan et al., 2016), engineering
laboratory (McCusker et al., 2018), education (Zhang
et al., 2018), readiness against earthquakes (Lovreglio
et al, 2018).
Since its beginnings, animation has evolved
alongside the technology, being presented in old
technologies like the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope,
and zoetrope, until arriving at the current media of
cinema and television (Sutton, Williams, 2009).
Google tried to explore animation in virtual reality
with the project called Spotlight, which is a project of
3D animated stories in virtual reality using 360
degrees, with projects like Age of Sail, based on
history by William Avery. They also developed Back
to the Moon, in celebration of George Melies and his
movie A Trip to the Moon.
Considering that virtual reality is being used in
other areas of research, and animation has historically
been tested in new types of media the idea of the
research is to create a procedure to adapt traditional
3D animation to virtual reality to create new forms of
narrative for animation. To do this, we need first to
discuss empirically how we can start to adapt 3D
animation concepts to the media of virtual reality so
we can understand the core problem of this
proposition to create new forms, techniques, and
procedures for the narrative in the animation.
In this paper, we will for starters, introduce the
basics concepts of virtual reality, how it works, which
its upsides and downsides are, followed by the twelve
308
Salomão, A., Vieira, M., Romeiro, N. and Nassar, V.
Theorized Work for Adapting the Principles of Animation to Virtual Reality as a New Form of Narrative for 3D Animation.
DOI: 10.5220/0010338303080312
In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) - Volume 1: GRAPP, pages
308-312
ISBN: 978-989-758-488-6
Copyright
c
2021 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
principles of animation discussed by Ollie Johnston
and Frank Thomas in the book Disney Animation:
The Illusion of Life (1981). Then we will open a
discussion about how we view the principles of
animation that can or cannot be adapted to the
uniqueness of virtual reality and the ideas we have for
the next step of this research.
2 FUNDAMENTALS
First, we will approach the necessary fundamentals
knowledge necessary to discuss virtual reality and
animation principles.
2.1 Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is a technology that is growing in
popularity, being used in entertainment, but also
research education, and training (Zhang, M; Zhang,
Z; Chang, Y. 2018).
Even though the concept of virtual reality can be
backtracked to 1960 with Ivan Sutherland (Cipresso
et al. 2018), for the sake of the proposed discussion in
this article, we will be using the definition and system
proposed by LaValle (2017) for virtual reality that
uses the following concept.
Artificial sensory stimulation is used to induce
targeted behavior in an organism, while the
interference remains either imperceptible or
hardly perceptible.
LaValle also creates an image concept of how the
virtual reality’s system is supposed to work, having
the connection between three components, the
organism, the physical world, and the hardware, and
how they connect and/or interact with each other, the
image concept proposed by LaValle can be seen in
Figure 1.
Figure 1: Schematics of LaValle’s concept (2017).
Virtual Reality has its limitations considering
design choices, in the virtual world, it is suggested
that the scales should be as faithful as possible to the
real world, to let the user be more familiar with the
depth and perspective and navigate it more naturally
without discomfort. It is advised to avoid designing
environments where much user movement is needed.
Concerns about the visual render are first that the only
difference between the left and right visions must be
the user’s point of view and nothing else. All the UI
must be incorporated in the virtual world and not be
something fixed. The rendering system must be
optimized to assure a constant frame rate. Avoiding
the illusion of undesired movement, and do not make
the camera move when the user is not moving. When
camera movement is needed to make the impression
that the user is moving, as a rollercoaster simulation,
as an example, it must be done carefully so it does not
give the user side effects (Salomão, 2020). Nolan et
al. (2017) say that every camera movement is
perceived as a user sight moving, implying that any
movement not controlled by the user may cause
discomfort.
It is of importance to understand and comprehend
the negative effects of virtual on users and why it can
happen for the safety of the user (Jerald, 2015),
otherwise as researchers and workers in this field, we
will not be able to create a hypothesis, ideas, and
design solutions for 3D animation in virtual reality
that can be feasible for the end-user.
For this article, we will consider, for the sake of
discussion, the organism to be the user, the Head-
Mounted Display (HMD) as the hardware for virtual
reality, and the physical world, a workplace where the
user will be interacting with the virtual world.
2.2 Animation Principles
As stated beforehand, for this study we will consider
the twelve principles of animation by Johnston &
Thomas (1981), two senior animators of Disney
Studios written in the book Disney Animation: The
Illusion of Life, as a starting point for the discussion
of adapting 3D animation to the media of virtual
reality.
The first principle Squash & Stretch means to
squash and stretch the objects during their animation
to give the sensation of the flexibility of it. In
animation classic cartoon animation by Disney, this
effect was exaggerated to cause a comic effect, while
in realistic styled animation, the volume of the object
must be balanced between both concepts.
Then we have the principle of Anticipation
intending to make actions more realistic and avoid the
abrupt initiation of movement. For example, the act
of inspiring air before blowing it on a candle is
necessary this movement of inspiring the air so the
audience is prepared for what is about to happen and
doesn’t miss the joke or the meaning of the scene.
Theorized Work for Adapting the Principles of Animation to Virtual Reality as a New Form of Narrative for 3D Animation
309
Following anticipation, we have the principle of
Staging, where the idea is that every scene in the
animation has a purpose, and the composition of this
scene has to meet the needs of this purpose, working
to direct the audience attention and not leave the open
interpretation of what is happening, unless that is the
point of the scene.
The fourth principle is the combination of Straight
Ahead Action with Pose to Pose, the first being an
animation technique where the frames are drawing in
sequence as the action is being developed while the
second consist of first drawing the necessary
keyframes of the animation and then the in-betweens
of it
The fifth principle is also a combination of Follow
Trough with Overlapping Action, which defines the
form in which the object’s body does not stop moving
immediately once the action is concluded, and that
they are attracted to the gravity’s center of the
character, creating progressively a more natural and
fluid animation.
Slow In and Out as a principle works with the
acceleration and slowdown of objects, the goal is to
avoid the movement to seem robotic and unrealistic
by adding a slow in effect at the start of the movement
and a slow out effect when stopping the movement.
The seventh principle of animation is Arc, the idea
is that natural movements from an organism can be
usually represented by an arc, like the walking cycle
of a human character. The principle consists in to
avoid using linear movements since those usually
cause an effect of the character being rigid, instead of
by using an arc movement, it has a more fluid and
natural movement.
Secondary Action as the eighth principle works as
an adjunct to the main action of the character, which
means that it cannot be more important and take the
attention of the viewer out of the main action. For
example, in a scene where two characters are talking,
the gentle gesture of the hands of one on a table
cannot overtake the main action otherwise the viewer
will not pay attention to what is being said.
To dictate the rhythm of the animation we also
have Timing as a principle, referring to the number of
frames used in determining action, dictating the pace
of said action, and making it more physically realistic,
such as in an animation of a character running, where
fewer frames will be used to present the idea of speed.
The tenth principle, Exaggeration, to make the
actions more entertaining, exaggeration is applied to
expressions, actions, and overall elements of the
scene, making the eyes bigger to express surprise, or
making the character melt to demonstrate heat are
examples of how this principle is applied to
animations.
Animation at the start, being mostly 2D, also used
a lot of concepts and ideas from drawing, that is what
the eleventh principle of animation is about, Solid
Drawing, the idea of making the drawing not appear
as flat, giving it volume, using light, shadow,
perspective and avoiding showing asymmetric
character.
Lastly, we have Appeal which presents the idea
that a character must be designed to be charismatic,
with the objective of the spectator liking and bonding
with it, drawing the character with baby-like facial
features tends to make them more appealing to the
audience than one with complex facial features.
3 DISCUSSION
John Bucher (2018) after interviewing Jessica
Brillhart, a filmmaker for project Spotlight, took as
concepts for animation in virtual reality that engaging
with the user feels more like a dance than a forced
experience, characters can work as vessels for the
story, traditional narratives structures like three-act
might be used, but not entirely as it is, among other
discovery.
The twelve principles of animation by Johnston &
Thomas were developed during years of work in the
Walt Disney animation studios, it was also done using
the traditional type of media, a two-dimensional
plane, to explore the narratives of an animation.
Virtual reality brings a new dimension, the
possibility to work with a tri-dimensional plane, or to
explore the two-dimensional plane with a 360 degrees
video, which enables the possibilities of new concepts
being developed.
These new concepts for 3D animation can be done
by creating a virtual world, like an ordinary game in
virtual reality, that runs in real-time, or more in line
with a traditional animation that runs as a pre-
rendered work that is being displayed to the user.
So, considering the possibilities of virtual reality,
the first principle of Squash and Stretch can be
explored in the immersion sense. What this means is
that, even though the concept itself does not change,
we can give it more depth and scale, which means, for
example, things that stretch can go beyond the two-
dimensional plane by wrapping the user in the
movement of the object, and since he is also
immersed in a virtual world. The same idea can be
applied to the principle of Secondary Action and
Anticipation, we can go beyond the boundaries of a
two-dimensional plane and enhance the impact of the
GRAPP 2021 - 16th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications
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principle, improving the experience and the way the
narrative is told.
The staging principle works a lot of the time with
camera cuts, with the idea to bring the attention of the
user to a narrative event. But how to properly do that
in virtual reality? In both proposed scenarios, the user
can just spin his head around and completely miss an
important moment of the story. One proposition we
have is the use of environmental elements to redirect
the user’s attention to the point of narrative focus.
This is done already in open-world games especially
where in an open-space the game has to guide the
player in a certain direction so he can progress with
the game, the same can be applied to animation in
virtual reality.
If we think of the development of animation in
virtual reality as the development of a game, we will
see that both use the same form of animation, Straight
Ahead Action and Pose to Pose, as necessary. Virtual
reality does not seem to influence this animation
principle at first glance, since it is the result that
affects the user and his experience. But in case the
animation runs in real-time in the virtual reality
experience, we suggest looking into studies about the
performance of the animation effects if done by
interpolation or frame by frame on real-time
rendering to see if it has a meaningful impact to the
point where one technique might be more reliable
than the other for a better chance of having locked
frames per second to not cause health issues to the
user.
The same performance issues can be the case for
the principle of Follow Through & Overlapping
Action and Arc. With current hardware limitations in
virtual reality, these principles can be removed
entirely to increase the performance of the animation,
considering this principle can be notoriously seen in
hair movements, and those require an extra amount of
power to animate properly even in non-virtual reality
environments. The necessary Arc movements of
characters for example might be less fluid due to the
nature of having models with lower polygons count.
Regarding Slow In and Out, alongside the
principle of Timing, here we must take extra care
especially in certain situations, it might make or break
the experience for the user. Traditionally, both
principles oversee different aspects of the timing of
the animation, and timing in virtual reality is crucial
for certain situations like for example, let’s theorize a
scene where the player is following the main
character in a car, because of the immersion effect
virtual reality has, animating the speed up and the
slow down of the car is not something we can just
ignore and remove from it like the previous principle.
If in this scene, the car suddenly stops out of nowhere
instead of slow down, the abrupt stop of it could jar
the user and cause side effects on his health. The same
can be said for the opposite, if for example, the
environment of the animation speeds up for whatever
reason, it might also cause a disorientation effect.
In animations, it is often that characters,
environments, and the animation itself are
exaggerated, but as we theorized with Squash &
Stretch and Secondary Action, it is bound by the
media it is in, there is so much exaggeration we can
fit into a two-dimensional plane screen. In virtual
reality, the possibilities of exaggeration are limited by
its virtual world and how much you can do it without
having a performance impact, finding the balance of
performance and narrative impact is key to use this
principle properly in animation for virtual reality.
The Solid Drawing principle of animation is
related to the concepts of drawing and how important
it is to follow it to create a proper drawing for
animation. Even when working on 3D animation, the
result is demonstrated in a two-dimensional plane,
just like hand drawing. For virtual reality, it is
important to keep the virtual world in scale with the
real world, a different scale can cause health issues,
that is where the importance of Solid Drawing shows
in virtual reality, keeping the object on a scale and in
check of what the user expects to be real to avoid
health issues.
Lastly, Appeal can be seen as the culmination of
all principles being properly applied to the animation,
true assessment of the Appeal principle on animation
in virtual reality can only be checked or studied
properly once every principle has been tested to
exhaustion. It is entirely possible that by studying
every principle, we might even see new concepts or
ideas for what is considered appealing for the virtual
reality’s user.
4 CONCLUSIONS
It was presented in this paper the idea of needing to
first discuss empirically the adaption of the principles
of animation as the first step to create a new procedure
for the development of new or adaptation of 3D
animation in virtual reality.
The conclusion is that the adaptation of the
principles of animation for the media of virtual reality
will require a better understanding of the limits
imposed by the selected hardware.
We see examples like Squash & Stretch,
Anticipation, and Secondary Action where virtual
reality might help create new creative ways of
Theorized Work for Adapting the Principles of Animation to Virtual Reality as a New Form of Narrative for 3D Animation
311
applying those concepts due to the fact of the
animation not being bound to a two-dimensional
plane and instead of being on a tri-dimensional plane.
We also see principles that instead be restricted in
virtual reality, like Follow Through & Overlapping
Action and Arc, due to the limitation of the hardware.
Both animations require more polygons to have a
fluent animation, and in virtual reality, there is a
tendency of reducing them for performance's sake.
The reality is that even though we can theorize
good and bad applications of the principles in virtual
reality, it is necessary to do more applicated research
on this topic to narrow down the issues in each case,
and consequently, find solutions to problems and
creative innovations to create a better experience to
watch 3D animation for the viewer.
Just as 2D animation principles had a transition
period to 3D, one is also necessary for virtual reality
to create a feasible product for the end-user, be it
animation for entertainment purposes or as of help for
society.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the Federal University of Santa Catarina.
The financial support of CAPES and FAPESC. And
the team in DesignLAB/UFSC and Tecmidia for the
collaboration to this research.
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