Animation

The animation of 3D models and the interpolation of camera paths is the first part of my phd study. The example movie (4MB MPEG-1) shows a flight path over an archeological excavation site in Turkey. The 3D model of the scene is generated by the 3D reconstruction algorithm (see publications) invented by Zisserman and Beardsley from Oxford and enhanced by Pollefeys together with the head of our group Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reinhard Koch.
If you watch the movie, you might recognize that the camera moves zick-zack-like above the ground with infinite acceleration at the key positions. This bouncing effect occurs, because the path was interpolated linearly between the keypoints (16 for this movie). In this movie (4MB MPEG-1) the same path was interpolated with cubic splines generating a smooth impression. The interpolation actually involves 3 parallel interpolations: the position, the orientation and the upvector of the camera. The rendering is done with openSG, which is based on openGL.

OpenSG

OpenSG (Open Scene Graph) is a portable scenegraph system to create realtime graphic programs and relies on openGL. It is the rendering basis for my applications and gives access to different 3D-model formats, like VRML97. The animation above is based on the scenegraph's transform nodes, though openSG itself does not include animation routines.
Further information: www.opensg.org