Lion Dance Animation By Vincent Chan

You might have seen these costumes around the month of February, during Chinese New Years. These performances are known as Lion Dancing, a traditional Chinese performance done every New Years to wish away bad luck and bring in good luck.



But ever wonder what people actually do inside the lion? Watch this clip to find out!



Project Description



This project was done using OpenGL for Cal Poly CPE471 Intro to Computer Graphics, taught by Zoe Wood in Winter 2015.

Computer Graphics Technologies/Skills:

Hierarchical Modeling for Person:
Uses 34 meshes to hierarchically model and draw the human. Added in angles of rotations at various joints including the shoulders, elbows, hands, fingers, hips, knees, and heels. Since the meshes were hollow, spheres were also added at the joints(shoulders, butts, elbows, ankles, fingers) to create a smooth character when animating.


Hierachical Modeling for Scroll:
Uses 7 meshes to draw the scroll. The scroll falling down is animated through the fragment shader discard and in the main cpp file. The bottom cylinder falls during a specified time, and more of the scroll unravels and is seen as the fragment shader discards less and less of the scroll after the specified time.

Animation:
The animation was made with many key animation frames in mind, and applying translation and rotation matrices for the in betweens.

Audio:
The audio was synced up with the video through Camtasia. The graphics program itself has no audio.

Special Thanks

Ellen Fabini for the person meshes.
Alvin Wong for the scroll meshes.
Anna Velasquez for the drumbeat audio.
Cal Poly Lion Dance Team for the images.