Avid Technology Limited

Gareth John Morgan

Rejean Gagne

Ian F Stewart

Daniel Beaudry

Alexandre Jean Claude

Luc Bolduc

A visual programming interface allows an artist to create real time shaders using a tree of shader nodes. Each shader node represents an operation that can be performed in real time through the real time rendering engine. The visual interface allows the arbitrary combinations of these shader nodes to be made and allows the parameters of the shaders to be manipulated or animated. The visual programming interface may be activated in an interactive animation environment through a designation that a real time shader is to be applied to a surface. By integrating the visual programming interface with an interactive animation environment, an artist can experiment readily with different custom real time shaders. An artist also has the flexibility to create arbitrary real time shader trees and to view them interactively without requiring a programmer to develop or modify a custom shader. Basic operations represented by such shader nodes include drawing to a frame buffer (which may include a blending operation with the contents of the frame buffer), a transform operation and lighting operations. A tree of shader nodes may be processed in multiple passes. Each drawing operation in the tree defines a separate pass. The result of each pass is blended with the results of prior passes according to parameters defined for the drawing operation.

Visual programming interface for a three-dimensional animation system for defining real time shaders using a real-time rendering engine application programming interface

A method and system employing an NLE to create and modify 3D animations by mixing and compositing animation data includes Actions which represent one or more animatable parameters for an animation object. The Actions are presented in an Action list from which a user may select and are positioned on an NLE-type time line for the animation object. Actions can be manipulated in a manner, which is believed to be intuitive, and is similar to the manipulation of clips in conventional NLE systems, to alter the length or speed of components of the animation and can be mixed and/or composited and otherwise manipulated to produce a desired 3D computer generated animation.

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Montreal, Canada

Gareth John Morgan