What is animation?
a display of pictures which are usually hand drawn or computer generated in a rapid section to create an illusion of motion
Types of animation
Cel animation
Path animation
2-D and 3-D animation
Stop motion animation
What is Cel animation?
This is the traditional animation
It is derived from the word celluloid, which is early motion picture film material. A transparent piece of film used for hand animation.
Films layered on each other to create a ‘frame’.
A frame consist of a background cel and a foreground cel.
What is path animation?
Different from traditional animation as it uses mathematical entities like vectors.
It consists of:
1. Sprite - an image or collection of images
2. Spline - Motion path along which sprite moves. Set of equations splines pass through set of anchor points.
Sprite moving along the path spline is called as sprite animation.
Example of a ball bouncing.
What is 2-D and 3-D animations?
2-D animation - does not care about the depth of objects, depicts animation on flat surface
3-D animation - considers the depth of objects, involves modelling, rendering and adding surface properties lighting in camera motions. Considers space coordinates
What is stop motion animation?
Physically manipulating the object which appears to be moving on its own
Individual photographs are taken and in between those photographs, the object is moved slightly. After this photographs are shown in rapid succession, showing the object to be moving.
What are the principles of animation?
- Squash and stretch
- Anticipation
- Staging
- Straight ahead and pose to pose
- Follow through and overlapping action
- Slow in and slow out
- Arcs
- Secondary action
- Timing and motion
- Exaggeration
- Solid drawing
- Appeal
What is computer based animation?
- Based on key frame concept
- CGI (Computer Generated Imaging)
- Saves time of the animator
- Talk about traditional animation
- Used in entertainment industry in movies or films
Process of computer based animation:
- Input process
- Composition stage
- In between process
- Changing color - uses CLUT(Color Look Up Table)
What is 3D animation?
- Creating moving of images in 3D environment.
- Manipulating 3D objects or models to give more realistic animation and visual effects.
- Mostly a computer program used to create 3D animations.
- Unlike 2D, uses space coordinate axes
What are the steps to creating 3D animation?
- Modelling - 2D to 3D. Lofting and Lathing
- Surface Texturing - giving realistic appearances using surface textures
- Lighting - illuminate 3D models to specify their color, direction and intensities
- Camera - how the scene will look like. Panning and zooming
- Animation - generate key frames and tweening to produce intermediate frames
- Rendering - display the final output file. Contains file size, format, frame rate etc.
Techniques of animation:
- Onion skinning
- Masking
- Motion Cycling
- Flip-book
- Morphing
- Color changing
- Blue screening
- Adding Sound
