PhD - 3D Computer Animation (1986-89) | Professor Nigel W. John

Professor Nigel W. John FEG FLSW

Home   Research   About   Contact

PhD - 3D Computer Animation (1986-89)



My PhD at the University of Bath was my first experience of working in a research group, and my topic was focussed on 3D Computer Animation. John, N. W. (1989). Techniques for planning computer animation. PhD Thesis, University of Bath. There was no commercial software available at the time and so I wrote my own 3D computer animation system, called Controller, from scratch (John & Willis, 1989). I investigated different techniques for simulating the motion of the characters and cameras. The image above was created by a student from the local arts college who used Controller to create an animation for his degree ceremony - “Hit the show, Mac!”. All frames were rendered using John Spackman’s ray tracing software. A poor quality copy of the animation (copied from VHS tape and without the original sound track) can be played here:

Further Reading

  1. John, N. W., & Willis, P. J. (1989). The Controller animation system. Computer Graphics Forum, 8(2), 133–138.