What is Animation?
Animation is a type of optical illusion. It involves the appearance of motion caused by displaying still images one after another. Often, animation is used for entertainment purposes.
In addition to its use for entertainment, animation is considered a form of art. It is often displayed and celebrated in film festivals throughout the world. Also used for educational purposes, animation has a place in learning and instructional applications as well.
Cartoon animation is often considered to be animation in its classic form. The animated cartoon made its debut in the early part of the 20th century and calls for the use of 24 different drawings per second. In traditional animated cartoons, frames are hand drawn.
Animation is both time-consuming and costly to produce. For this reason, most of the animation made for television and film is produced by professorial studios. However, there are also many independent studios. In fact, there are many resources, such as lower-cost animation programs and distribution networks, that make the work of the independent animator much easier than it was in the past.
When animation is used for films or movies, each frame is produced on an individual basis. Frames can be produced using computers or photographs of images that are either drawn or painted. Frames can also be generated by altering a model unit in small ways and using a special camera to take pictures of the results. No matter what method is used, the film or movie that results fools the eye into seeing continuous movement.
Persistence of vision is often projected as the reason the eyes can be fooled into seeing continuous movement that isn't really happening. Basically, the brain and the eyes cooperate, storing images for a mere fraction of a second. Minor jumps or blips are automatically smoothed out by the brain. Since animation frames are shot at very fast rates, most individuals see the movement without stoppages.
Keep in mind that persistence of vision is a theory and not a proven concept. Many film academics and theorists accept its relevance to animation. However, there are some scientists that call the theory a complete myth.
Though the work of producing animated movies and cartoons can be intense and laborious, computer animation can make the process much faster. Computer technology is steadily improving, and professionals are able to create life-like characters using computers and special animation software. However, skilled animators are still necessary for producing quality animations. After all, computers are not yet capable of making artistic choices and bringing real passion to simple images.
Maya is the culmination of three 3D software lines:
Wavefront's The Advanced Visualizer (in California), Thomson Digital Image (TDI) Explore (in France) and Alias' Power Animator (in Canada). In 1993 Wavefront purchased TDI, and in 1995 Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) purchased both Alias and Wavefront (due to pressure from Microsoft's purchase of Softimage earlier that year) and combined them into one working company, producing a single package from their collective source code. The combined company was referred to as AliasWavefront. In the mid-1990s, the most popular pipeline in Hollywood films was a combination of tools: Alias Studio for modeling, Softimage for animation, and PhotoRealistic RenderMan for rendering. This combination was used for numerous films, such as Jurassic Park, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It took Alias Wavefront two more years after the merger to release Maya.
Both Alias and Wavefront were working on their next generation of software at the time of the merger. Alias had taken a Macintosh product, "Alias Sketch!", moved it to the SGI platform and added many features to it. The code name for this project was "Maya", the Sanskrit term for "illusion." Maya was developed in close collaboration with Walt Disney Feature Animation, during the production of Dinosaur, and the GUI was all customizable as a requirement from Disney so they could set up their own GUI and workflow based on decades of animation experience. This had a large impact on the openness of Maya and later also helped the software become an industry standard, since many facilities implement extensive proprietary customization of the software to gain competitive advantage.
It was then decided to adopt Alias' "Maya" architecture, and merge Wavefront's code with it.
In the early days of development, Maya used Tcl as the scripting language. After the merger, there was debate amongst those who supported Tcl, Perl and Sophia. Sophia was much faster than the others and won out. However, once error checking was added, it ended up being equally slow.
Upon its release in 1998, Alias Wavefront discontinued all previous animation-based software lines including Alias Power Animator, encouraging consumers to upgrade to Maya. It succeeded in expanding its product line to take over a great deal of market share, with leading visual effects companies such as Industrial Light and Magic and Tippett Studio switching from Softimage to Maya for the animation software.
Traditional animation:
An example of traditional animation, a horse animated by rotoscoping from Eadweard Muybridge's 19th century photos.(Also called cel animation or hand-drawn animation) Traditional animation was the process used for most animated films of the 20th century. The individual frames of a traditionally animated film are photographs of drawings, which are first drawn on paper. To create the illusion of movement, each drawing differs slightly from the one before it. The animators' drawings are traced or photocopied onto transparent acetate sheets called cels, which are filled in with paints in assigned colors or tones on the side opposite the line drawings. The completed character cels are photographed one-by-one onto motion picture film against a painted background by a rostrum camera.
Full animation refers to the process of producing high-quality traditionally animated films, which regularly use detailed drawings and plausible movement. Fully animated films can be done in a variety of styles, from realistically designed works such as those produced by the Walt Disney studio, to the more "cartoony" styles of those produced by the Warner Bros. animation studio. Many of the Disney animated features are examples of full animation, as are non-Disney works such as The Secret of NIMH (US) and The Iron Giant (US)
Limited animation involves the use of less detailed and/or more stylized drawings and methods of movement. Pioneered by the artists at the American studio United Productions of America, limited animation can be used as a method of stylized artistic expression, as in Gerald McBoing Boing (US), Yellow Submarine (UK), and much of the anime produced in Japan. Its primary use, however, has been in producing cost-effective animated content for media such as television (the work of Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and other TV animation studios) and later the Internet (web cartoons). Rotoscoping is a technique, patented by Max Fleischer in 1917, where animators trace live-action movement, frame by frame. The source film can be directly copied from actors' outlines into animated drawings, as in The Lord of the Rings (US), used as a basis and inspiration for character animation, as in most Disney films, or used in a stylized and expressive manner, as in Waking Life (US) and A Scanner Darkly (US).
Stop motion (or frame-by-frame)
is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames are played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion animations, known as claymation, for their ease of repositioning.
Clay animation is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay. The portmanteau term "Claymation" is a registered trademark in the United States, registered by Will Vinton in 1978 to describe his clay-animated films. While the word is not considered a genericized trademark, it has become a trademark that is often used generically in the U.S. and is the predominant term in the UK to refer to any animation using Plasticine or similar substance.
Technique In clay animation, one of the many forms of stop-motion animation, each object is sculpted in clay or a similarly pliable material such as Plasticine, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature. As in other forms of object animation, the object is arranged on the set (background), a film frame is exposed, and the object or character is then moved slightly by hand. Another frame is taken, and the object is moved slightly again. This cycle is repeated until the animator has achieved the desired amount of film. The human mind processes the series of slightly changing, rapidly playing images as motion, hence making it appear that the object is moving by itself. To achieve the best results, a consistent shooting environment is needed to maintain the illusion of continuity. This means paying special attention to maintaining consistent lighting and object placement and working in a calm environment.
Computer animation:
A short gif animationLike stop motion, computer animation encompasses a variety of techniques, the unifying idea being that the animation is created digitally on a computer.
2D animation:
2D animation figures are created and/or edited on the computer using 2D bitmap graphics or created and edited using 2D vector graphics. This includes automated computerized versions of traditional animation techniques such as of tweening, morphing, onion skinning and interpolated rotoscoping.
Examples: Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, SpongeBob SquarePants(certain sequences only), Danny Phantom, The Fairly OddParents, El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera
Analog computer animation Flash animation PowerPoint animation.
3D animation:
3D animation digital models manipulated by an animator. In order to manipulate a mesh, it is given a digital armature (sculpture). This process is called rigging. Various other techniques can be applied, such as mathematical functions (ex. gravity, particle simulations), simulated fur or hair, effects such as fire and water and the use of Motion capture to name but a few. Many 3D animations are very believable and are commonly used as special effects for recent movies.
Examples: Toy Story, Shrek, Pocoyo.
