Mote Marine Laboratory

Digital Dolphins

By: Susannah Costello

At Mote Aquarium, we use the newest interactive computer technology to animate dolphins and educate the public

Animator Matt Goldblatt sees the world as an assemblage of polygons, multi-sided geometric forms — mostly triangles and squares — that can be combined to replicate reality.  That’s because Goldblatt’s job is building worlds out of polygons.

Digitally.

His newest realm is the aquamarine world of Sarasota Bay and its wild bottlenose dolphin inhabitants.

Goldblatt is the lead animator on “The Dolphin Bay Project,” a computer
interactive movie being produced for Mote by Immersion Studios of Canada. Sometime in summer 2005, the movie will debut at Mote’s new Immersion Cinema where 85 computer consoles will allow an audience of 170 to experience the unique combination of movie linked to video games.

Based on the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, a joint project of Mote Marine Laboratory and the Chicago Zoological Society, the innovative entertainment experience relies on state-of-the-art computer animation to bring the underwater life of Sarasota dolphins to Mote visitors.

Animating dolphins and the watery world they inhabit is no small challenge – especially when the goal is not fantasy but photo realism. Today’s animation process is very different than the classic cell animation that Disney made famous in the 1930s and 40s. “With 2-D animation, an artist paints a picture,” Goldblatt said. “With 3-D animation, an artist sculpts the picture.”

Before starting, Goldblatt studied hundreds of bottlenose dolphins to understand their three-dimensional shapes. Then, using a 3-D program that is 20 to 30 times more powerful than 2-D programs commonly available to graphic designers, Goldblatt “sculpts” a dolphin out of polygons and paints the sculpture with a skin texture. Once a dolphin model has been created, then it can be animated.

As important as the dolphin, is the environment around it. “Sarasota Bay has a very distinct water quality,” Goldblatt said. “There’s a fogginess underwater. Your vision is clouded over distance. There are unique patterns like the light shining through water onto the moving dolphins. There’s plankton, zooplankton and dinoflagellates constantly moving across your field of vision.”

The movie

The opening 20-second scene of “The Dolphin Bay Project” is created from a shifting stream of about 1.5 million polygons. Each piece of plankton that drifts across the screen is created with a single polygon. But hundreds of thousands of plankton polygons form and dissipate within those 20 seconds. The high-tech underwater lab that juts out of rock takes about a half million polygons. Each bolt on the window takes about 10 polygons.

How many polygons does it take to make a dolphin look real? The magic number in Dolphin Bay is 16,268.

Any time viewers see movie animation, they’re watching what experts call “pre-rendered animation” — a computer produces the animation before it appears on screen. By contrast, animation that you see while playing a video game is being created as it’s played — in real time.

The dolphins in the movie are both pre-rendered and real-time models.

How many polygons does it take to make a video game dolphin that will move well? A low 298.

Games use real-time models made of low numbers of polygons because computers can create or “draw” the images faster. A game dolphin can be rendered in about one-thirtieth of a second or faster. By contrast, a pre-rendered dolphin in its “environment” takes about 300 seconds to draw. That means it takes a computer 150 minutes to create a high-polygon dolphin image that would last only one second.

The video game modules that will be used in “The Dolphin Bay Project” will render the low polygon dolphin models in a fraction of second. “If we tried using high polygon models for game play, it would take a supercomputer which hasn’t been invented yet,” Goldblatt said.

Creating “cartoons”

Animators traditionally use three kinds of tools: keyframing, motion capture and simulation. 

The classic Disney animation process created keyframes and “tween animators” drew the movement between those keyframes. Today, computers generate tween frames.

Motion capture uses a computer to register the track of actual movements and translate that movement onto computer-generated characters.

With simulation, a model is created by the computer and then software is written that gives the computer rules for moving the object in a way that mirrors physical reality. The computer generates the reality, but the animators tell the computer what the parameters of that reality can be.

Dolphin Bay uses both key frame and simulation techniques. In fact, most of the animation in the program will be keyframed. But some of the most interesting animation will be achieved with simulation techniques.

“There are elements we are able to do now because of recent software advances, that I don’t think we at Immersion could have done five years ago,” Goldblatt said. “Before, animating a school of fish would have been a very complicated task. I would have had to animate each fish’s action individually.”

Now, Goldblatt can give the computer rules for the fish, such as “stick close to each other, but don’t touch; chase each other; flee from bigger fish.” Instead of drawing each movement of each fish, an animator tells all the fish how to behave and the software makes it so.

“Mickey Mouse didn’t strive to be realistic, so science had less of a role in his animation,” Golblatt said.

As animation gets more realistic, real science becomes increasingly important. Today’s animation process leverages the knowledge of mathematics, most importantly 3-D geometry, physics, dynamics, fluid dynamics, physiology, anatomy and — of course — classical animation.

Invisible art

“The best special effect,” said Goldblatt, “is the special effect you don’t notice. I want people to notice the dolphin, not the quality of the graphics. If it’s well done, animation is an invisible art.”

What’s possible now is a marriage between creativity and realism. “You can’t tell a real dolphin how to play a scene,” Goldblatt said. “But I can make an animated dolphin come up to the camera and wink at me.” 

Aquarium Vice President Dan Bebak doesn't want the audience to think about what it took to animate a dolphin or tape the movie or program the video game. He just wants the audience to experience the reality.

“ ‘The Dolphin Bay Project’ is based on real events and real places,” Bebak said. “Even though the movie is hypothetical, the situations could happen and have happened, just not on the same day. I don’t know of any other interactive program that’s like that.”

After all, how can a non-scientist experience the challenges of studying dolphins in the wild? Observe a dolphin in its underwater adventures? Make difficult decisions that face researchers, rescuers and policy makers — and see the impact of those choices?

Only in a digital world, one flying polygon after another.

Learn more about: Other exhibits at Mote Aquarium