ANIMATION SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Baylor College Of Medicine, Houston TX

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. We have been working in the field of 3D graphics for purposes of visualization and animation data interchange. Autodesk's FBX technology is one of the most widely used and supported platform-independent 3D graphics (e.g., polygons, NURBS) interchange solutions in the CAD and animation industry today. Planning is underway to create a high performance graphics bridge, between Chimera and Maya, the leading commercial animation package used in advanced biomedical animation (http://www.molecularmovies.org). A major and ongoing difficulty has been the transfer of 3D graphics, coordinate transformations, and camera positions created by one software program to a second software program, both of unrelated origins, to properly and identically interpret the data;frequently this is not possible due to fundamental data format and design differences, which will be addressed in the HDF-VFS hyperspace. The creation and use of the FBX/HDF-VFS data bridge will allow NCMI to directly diagnose and correct for these problems, resulting in supported software that will be made available to the biomolecular communities.