The tune, taken from A Handbook of Morris Dances ( by Lionel Bacon, publ. The Morris Ring )
The .mid file produced by copying the tune into the Lime Musical Notation (external link) package, adding a 'tabor' line and exporting as a MIDI file using the MIDI standard instruments: Piccolo and Synthetic Drum as the nearest available equivalents.
The dancer, coded as an instance of an external prototype ( MorrisMan), and hence a non- H-ANIM compliant avatar, is based on dork-proto.wrl by Michael Miller. A static version of this dancer was also used in last year's Christmas Card in which a set of dancers move, without articulation, about a Christmas Tree.
The musician is coded as a second instance of MorrisMan. His arms have been articulated to hold his instruments, the Pipe and Tabor, but they remain static during the animation.
The basic VRML file, jig0.wrl, was produced using a customised text-editor PFE (external link). The file contains the dancer and musician instantiations, the lighting, the sound control, the viewpoints and viewpoint animation.
.ANIM Files are text files containing a list of movable joints and a list of key frames containing the rotations of the joints. The .anim format was suggested by Bernie Broehl in "Late-night VRML 2.0 with Java". A .anim file is used to describe each of the individual Morris steps. The format is also that of the final data-file used by the Amimgen2 tool (see below). Individual dance steps, as taught to the author and as described in Fieldtown Dances and Jigs (by Bert Cleaver, publ. The Morris Ring.), were expressed as Kinetograms drawn using an elementary (because of this author's limited expertise) form of Labanotation They were used in conjuction with the Avatatar Animation Frame-data Editor, a home produced tool, to create the Animation Key-frames in .anim format
.SEQ Files embody a sequences of steps. A .seq file is a text file which contains a list of other .seq files and/or .anim files.
animcat.pl is a PERL script, which uses a .seq list of simple .anim dance-step files and/or secondary .seq files to produce a composite .anim dance file. This is processed by
Animgen2.java, a home-produced tool, which
creates, from a .anim file, a set of VRML Interpolators. These are appended
to the basic VRML file, using a simple DOS batch file, to produce the final
.wrl run-file component.
Animgen2 is an extension of animgen.java, a utility described
by Bernie Broehl in Late Night VRML 2.0 with Java. My extension
allows the .anim file to contain information about the position, height
above ground and orientation of the figure as well as the joint rotations.
It also allows the frame timing to be expressed in beats rather than
as a fraction of the total time duration.
seq2wrl.bat is the DOS batch file which combines the running of animcat.pl and animgen2 and appends the result to the base-file dancer0.wrl to produce the final run-file, dancer.wrl.
Peek
I have also used 'Peek', a simple tool from Vapor
Technology, to create my Viewpoints.
The Background against which the animation occurs is simple. It has been found that any attempt to increase the complexity of the model, even adding a textured surface on which to perform, degrades the frame-rate considerably. Although the system on which the animation has been developed has now only a moderate specification by current standards, I cannot, at present, expect more than a limited number of folk to have a much better one. For this reason I have produced four versions of the final animation, with different degrees of ancillary complexity, incorporating the same animation: dancer.wrl
Update: The tools animcat.pl and Animgen2.java have now been extended to cope with several dancers but, as yet, no completed animation has been produced which shows their use. My next project is a double jig and I have thoughts of doing a complete dance for a side of six men.