Difference: CPSC526ComputerAnimation (9 vs. 10)

• contribution: It was the first research that incorporated physical properties into an existing key frame-based system by the time the research was conducted. Tools were developed to help animators modify ballistic motions of characters and the physical accuracy of the high quality animations was investigated by measuring important physical properties.

• evaluation: Basically, the tools were tested by animators and the evaluation was based on the effectiveness of how much it helped the animators to create the physical realistic animation.

• reproducibility: I think the tool is reproducible since the basic idea is not hard to understand, and the math details are provided along with appendix. However some of the results seem to be less reproducible since it requires professional animators to create the ballistic motions, which could be uncertain.

• comments: Overall the paper is not hard to follow. However the structure of the paper is not clear when I first read it. I have to go back and forth to get clear about the organization. I also encountered a few issues. For example, the term “COM” was not explained, at the beginning I could only guess it is “center of mass” which could also be “center of momentum”. The paper also has a number of grammar or spelling issues such as “derived form”. But given the factor that this is a preprint version, the author may have corrected these kinds of issues in the final version.

--Evolving Virtual Creature

• contribution: The research creates a novel system for creating virtual creatures behaving in 3D physical world. The creature’s morphologies as well as their control systems are evolved. “A genetic language is presented that uses nodes and connections as its primitive elements to represent directed graphs, which are used to describe both the morphology and the neural circuitry of these creature.”[Karl Sims]

• evaluation: The experiment runs in parallel with one master node performing the genetic algorithm that chosen randomly from asexual, crossovers and grafting, and then sending out genotypes to other slave nodes to do fitness test and then gathering back the fitness values. The fitness tests include swimming, walking, jumping and following. After 50 to 100 generations, creatures that pass the fitness threshold survive and get selected.

• reproducibility: In my opinion the paper should be reproducible however it will involve large amount of work since the models used in the research are presented without detailed mathematics explanation. And I still don’t quite get how the phenotype “brain” is generated. But I think the physical simulation part shouldn’t be that hard since we use simplified models.

• comments: Overall the paper is well organized and I found the structure is not hard to follow. However it takes time to learn some background knowledge.

Baoxuan Xu

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