Computer Animation:
What is computer animation?
Computer animation can be described as an art form that involves bringing still images to life using computer technology. Animation in this form can apply to images on a computer or to those in film. When computer animation is used for movies, it is often called computer-generated imagery (CGI).
To create computer animation, a still, or non-moving image, is first displayed. With speed in mind, this image is then replaced with another image. The new image is very similar to the first, but has been changed in some small way. Each subsequent image is changed slightly. This combination of rapid image replacement and slight alteration of images creates the illusion of movement. Though computer technology is used for computer animation, the technique of creating the look of movement is the same as that used for television and movie animation.
To understand how movement is created with computer animation, consider a blank screen. Now imagine a person drawn on the left side of the screen. Then imagine the screen is blank again, and the next time you see the image of the person, it is positioned just a little to the right of its initial position. Once more, the screen is blanked, and the person is moved a bit more to the right. At a high speed, this slight movement of the image will result in the appearance of smooth movement to the right.
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Speed is key to the success of computer animation. To give the illusion of smooth movement, complete images, often called frames, must be shown at speeds of at least 12 images per second. At lesser speeds, the human eye is able to detect a certain amount of jerkiness. Interestingly, however, there is no advantage to showing images at speeds of 70 frames per second or more, as there is no noticeable improvement in movement perception at speeds this high.
When animation is created using conventional hand-drawn methods, it is not uncommon to use 15 frames per second. This is done to economize on the amount of drawings necessary to create the animation. However, computer animation is often used to create more realistic looking images. As such, the use of more frames per second is typically necessary.
A computer and special animation software are necessary for the creation of computer animation. There is a wide variety of animation software on the market today, with prices varying according to the intended use. In general, animation software intended for the novice to enjoy for fun or for simple animation is less costly. Software for more professional animation is not only more expensive, but also more comprehensive. However, even the most basic animation programs are capable of creating some amazing animations.
History of computer animation
As early as the 1940s and 50s, experiments in computer graphics were beginning, most notably by John Whitney -- but it was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by mid-1960s. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-dimensional imagery, though increasingly, as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-dimensional realism become the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in cinema movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
Contents
[hide]
John Whitney, Sr, was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation.[1] In the 1940s and 1950s, he and brother James created a series of experimental films made with a custom-built device based on an analog computer that was used originally for gunnery control. One of Whitney's most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass. In 1960, Whitney established his company Motion Graphics Inc, which largely focused on producing titles for film and television, but also continued in further experimental works. All of John Whitney's sons (Michael, Mark and John Jr.) are also film-makers. John Whitney died in 1995.
From the late 1950s and early 1960s, mainframe digital computers were becoming commonplace within large organisations and universities, and increasingly these would be equipped with graphic plotting and graphics screen devices. Consequently, a new field of experimentation began to open up.
In 1960, William Fetter was a graphic designer for Boeing at Lawrence Livermore Labs, and was credited with coining the phrase "Computer Graphics" to describe what he was doing at Boeing at the time (though Fetter himself credited this to colleague Verne Hudson).[2] Fetter's work included the development of ergonomic descriptions of the human body that are both accurate and adaptable to different environments, and this resulted in the first 3-D animated wire-frame figures. Such human figures became one of the most iconic images of the early history of computer graphics, and often were referred to as the "Boeing Man". Fetter died in 2002.
Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was a leading research contributor in computer graphics, computer animation and electronic music from its beginnings in the early 1960s. Initially, researchers were interested in what the computer could be made to do, but the results of the visual work produced by the computer during this period established people like Edward Zajac, Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton as pioneering computer artists.
Edward Zajac produced one of the first computer generated films at Bell Labs in 1961, titled "A Two Gyro Gravity Gradient Altitude Control System", which demonstrated that a satellite could be stabilized to always have a side facing the earth as it orbited.[3]
Ken Knowlton developed the Beflix (Bell Flicks) animation system in 1963, which was used to produce dozens of artistic films by artists Stan VanDerBeek, Noll, Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz.[4] Instead of raw programming, Beflix worked using simple "graphic primitives", like draw a line, copy a region, fill an area, zoom an area, and the like.
In 1965, Michael Noll created computer-generated stereographic 3-D movies, including a ballet of stick figures moving on a stage.[5] Some movies also showed four-dimensional hyper-objects projected to three dimensions.[6] Around 1967, Noll used the 4D animation technique to produce computer animated title sequences for the commercial film short "Incredible Machine" (produced by Bell Labs) and the TV special "The Unexplained" (produced by Walt DeFaria).[7] Many projects in other fields were also undertaken at this time.
Ivan Sutherland is considered by many to be the creator of Interactive Computer Graphics, and an internet pioneer. He worked at the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1962, where he developed a program called "Sketchpad I", which allowed the user to interact directly with the image on the screen. This was the first Graphical User Interface, and is considered one of the most influential computer programs ever written by an individual. [8]
[edit] The New Pioneers: mid-60s to mid-70s
The University of Utah was a major center for computer animation in this period. The computer science faculty was founded by David Evans in 1965, and many of the basic techniques of 3D computer graphics were developed here in the early 1970's with ARPA funding (Advanced Research Projects Agency). Research results included Gouraud, Phong, and Blinn shading, texture mapping, hidden surface algorithms, curved surface subdivision, real-time line-drawing and raster image display hardware, and early virtual reality work. [9] In the words of Robert Rivlin in his 1986 book The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age, "almost every influential person in the modern computer-graphics community either passed through the University of Utah or came into contact with it in some way".[10]
In 1968, Ivan Sutherland teamed up with David Evans to found the company Evans & Sutherland -- both were professors in the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah, and the company was formed to produce new hardware designed to to run the systems being developed in the University. Many such algorithms have resulted in the generation of significant hardware implementation, including the SGI Geometry Engine, the Head Mounted Display, the modern frame buffer, and flight simulators. [11] Most of the employees were active or former students, and included Jim Clark, who started Silicon Graphics in 1981, Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar in 1979, and John Warnock of Adobe Systems in 1982.
In July 1968, the arts journal Studio International published a special issue titled "Cybernetic Serendipity - the computer and the arts", which brought together a comprehensive collection of items and examples of work being done in the field of computer art in organisations all over the world.[12] This marked a milestone in the development of the medium, and was considered by many to be of widespread influence and inspiration. Apart from all the examples mentioned above, two another particularly well-known iconic images from this include "Chaos to Order"[13] by Charles Csuri (often referred to as the Hummingbird), created at Ohio State University in 1967[14], and "Running Cola is Africa"[15] by Masao Komura and Koji Fujino created at the Computer Technique Group, Japan, also in 1967. [16]
The first machine to achieve widespread public attention in the media was Scanimate, an analog computer animation system designed and built by Lee Harrison of the Computer Image Corporation in Denver. From around 1969 onward, Scanimate systems were used to produce much of the video-based animation seen on television in commercials, show titles, and other graphics. Scanimate, and sister machines Caesar and Animac, were all "hybrid" designs, using analog principles for initial image generation, and digital principles for data storage and control of image manipulatons. This allowed these systems to create animations in real time, giving a great advantage of purely digital techniques at the time.[17]
The National Film Board of Canada, already a world center for animation art, also began experimentation with computer techniques in 1969.[18] Most well-known of the early pioneers with this was artist Peter Foldes, who completed "Metadata" in 1971. This film comprised drawings animated by gradually changing from one image to the next, a technique known as "interpolating" (also known as "inbetweening" or "morphing"), which also featured in a number of earlier art examples during the 1960s.[19] In in 1974, Foldes completed Hunger / La Faim, which was one of the first films to show solid filled (raster scanned) rendering, and was awarded the Jury Prize in the short film category at Cannes Film Festival, as well as an Academy Award nomination.
The Atlas Computer Laboratory near Oxford was for many years a major facility for computer animation in Britain.[20] The first entertainment cartoon made was "The Flexipede", by Tony Pritchett, which was first shown publicly at the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968.[21] Artist Colin Emmett and animator Alan Kitching first developed solid filled colour rendering in 1972, notably for the title animation for the BBC's The Burke Special TV program.
In 1973, Kitching went on to develop a software called Antics, which allowed users to create animation without needing any programming.[22] The package was broadly based on conventional "cel" (celluloid) techniques, but with a wide range of tools including camera and graphics effects, interpolation, use of skeleton figures and grid overlays. Any number of drawings or cels could be animated at once by "choreographing" them in limitless ways. At the time, only black & white plotter output was available, but Antics was able to produce full-color output by using the Technicolor Three-strip Process. Hence the name Antics was coined as an acronym for ANimated Technicolor-Image Computer System. [23] Antics was used for many animation works, culminating in the first complete documentary movie "Finite Elements", made for the Atlas Lab itself in 1975.[24]
From around the early 1970s, much of the emphasis in computer animation development was towards ever increasing realism in 3-D imagery, and on effects designed for use in feature movies.
The first feature film to use digital image processing was the 1973 movie Westworld, a science-fiction film in which humanoid robots live amongst the humans.[25] John Whitney, Jr, and Gary Demos at Information International, Inc. digitally processed motion picture photography to appear pixelized in order to portray the Gunslinger android's point of view. The cinegraphic block portraiture was accomplished using the Technicolor Three-strip Process to color-separate each frame of the source images, then scanning them to convert into rectangular blocks according to its tone values, and finally outputting the result back to film. The process was covered in the American Cinematographer article Behind the scenes of Westworld.[26]
[edit] Towards 3-D: mid 70s to the 80s
The first use of 3D Wireframe imagery in mainstream cinema was in the sequel to Westworld, Futureworld (1976), which featured a computer-generated hand and face created by then University of Utah graduate students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. The third movie to use this technology was Star Wars (1977) for the scenes with the wireframe Death Star plans and the targeting computers in the X-wings and the Millennium Falcon. The Black Hole (1979) used raster wire-frame model rendering to depict a black hole. The science fiction-horror film Alien of that same year also used a raster wire-frame model, in this case to render the image of navigation monitors in the sequence where a spaceship follows a beacon to a land on an unfamiliar planet.
In 1978, graduate students at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab began work on what would have been the first full-length CGI film, The Works, and a trailer for it was shown at SIGGRAPH 1982, but the film was never completed ("CGI" = Computer Graphics Imagery). Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan premiered a short CGI sequence called The Genesis Effect in June 1982. The first two films to make heavy investments in Solid 3D CGI, Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984), were commercial failures, causing most directors to relegate CGI to images that were supposed to look like they were created by a computer.
Another Star Trek movie - 1986's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - features a little-known use of CGI that would prove to be a major stepping stone for the technology in years to come. The dream-like sequence where Kirk and his crew (in a commandeered Klingon starship) travel back in time features computer-generated images of the crew's faces "morphing" into one another. Although the images look like clay sculptures, they represent the antecedents of the photo-realistic morphing that would become popular in the early 1990s, and the ILM team responsible would be sought out by James Cameron three years later (see below).
Computer Animation If you are looking for a career in the computer animation field, we hope we can help.
This site is dedicated to providing information about modern animation classes at schools either at a campus near you as well as convenient online courses and degree programs.
Computer animation is basically the process of using a computer to create the appearance of moving or still images. It has developed into a subset of different disciplines — computer graphics, animation and visual effects.
For the most part, computer animation is still animation, but just with some new, fancy tools. The difference between today’s digital animator and yesterday’s drawing on paper animator is the tool they use.
Computer animation can be called Computer Generated Imagery or CGI. CGI animation is the process of making images which appear to move through the help of modern computing tools.
Digital animation can be developed into either two dimensional or three dimensional graphics. Two dimensional work is used for low-bandwidth projects and fast rendering. Three dimensional (3D) animation takes the process one step further, allowing for better looking projects, but are slower to produce and require more bandwidth.
A good computer animator will possess the skills of a graphic designer and a computer software professional. Computer graphics professionals need to have both technology knowledge and creative skill.
This type of animation is used extensively in film and television, computer games, and on the Web. Producers of movies and television prefer to use animated techniques because they are less expensive and more controllable than real life scenes with extras and crowds or constructing miniatures or elaborate sets. Often, certain scenes couldn’t be produced with any other technology or than digital animation. When it comes to cost, a single graphic artist can often produce elaborate content without the use of actors or expensive sets.
Daily work for a designer typically involves working with software programs to produce original digital images or to reproduce images drawn by hand into a digital format.
A diploma or degree in this field will typically give you the necessary knowledge you need to start your career. You will learn drawing and the principles of color, shading and perspective. You will learn the essential software programs. You will work on the fundamentals of animation, texture mapping and motion capture, along with the differences between digital and real life and how that impacts the objects, characters and scenes in the virtual environments that you work in.
A computer animator is a specialist in a valued field, so average salaries are pretty good. If you can learn the job and produce good work, you can earn a good salary and have a nice career.
Good luck to you in whatever you decide and whatever career field you go into.
Computer Animation Software Reviews
It's not always easy to choose one software package over another. From user-friendliness to functionality, price to package features and extras, there are quite a few influencing factors in the decision of just which computer animation software to try out. This listing offers this Guide's opinion as to how various software packages stack up against each other, and rates them on a scale of one to five.
Animation Software Review: Adobe Flash CS5 The latest version of Flash brings the shiny.
Animation Software Review: Poser Pro 2010 3D Modeling & Anima… For less than $500 Poser Pro 2010 lets animators create content that nears the sophistication of basic models from high-end studio animation programs that cost thousands of doll
Types of Computer Animation X
Dennis Hartman
Dennis Hartman is a freelance writer living in California. His work covers a wide variety of topics and has been published nationally in print as well as online. Hartman holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and a Master of Arts from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
By Dennis Hartman, eHow Contributor
Types of Computer Animation
Artists have been using computers to make the process of animation faster, easier and more cost effective since the 1980s. Computer animation has also allowed for a new level of realism that could never have been achieved when animation was drawn by hand. Today computer animation exists in several distinct forms for serving different purposes.
Read more: Types of Computer Animation | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_5256092_types-computer-animation.html#ixzz1wQ9dl055
(Arrange By Usman Nadeem)
Computer animation can be described as an art form that involves bringing still images to life using computer technology. Animation in this form can apply to images on a computer or to those in film. When computer animation is used for movies, it is often called computer-generated imagery (CGI).
To create computer animation, a still, or non-moving image, is first displayed. With speed in mind, this image is then replaced with another image. The new image is very similar to the first, but has been changed in some small way. Each subsequent image is changed slightly. This combination of rapid image replacement and slight alteration of images creates the illusion of movement. Though computer technology is used for computer animation, the technique of creating the look of movement is the same as that used for television and movie animation.
To understand how movement is created with computer animation, consider a blank screen. Now imagine a person drawn on the left side of the screen. Then imagine the screen is blank again, and the next time you see the image of the person, it is positioned just a little to the right of its initial position. Once more, the screen is blanked, and the person is moved a bit more to the right. At a high speed, this slight movement of the image will result in the appearance of smooth movement to the right.
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Create 3D renderings and animations in seconds. Download KeyShot Now!
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www.rdi.co.uk/online
Speed is key to the success of computer animation. To give the illusion of smooth movement, complete images, often called frames, must be shown at speeds of at least 12 images per second. At lesser speeds, the human eye is able to detect a certain amount of jerkiness. Interestingly, however, there is no advantage to showing images at speeds of 70 frames per second or more, as there is no noticeable improvement in movement perception at speeds this high.
When animation is created using conventional hand-drawn methods, it is not uncommon to use 15 frames per second. This is done to economize on the amount of drawings necessary to create the animation. However, computer animation is often used to create more realistic looking images. As such, the use of more frames per second is typically necessary.
A computer and special animation software are necessary for the creation of computer animation. There is a wide variety of animation software on the market today, with prices varying according to the intended use. In general, animation software intended for the novice to enjoy for fun or for simple animation is less costly. Software for more professional animation is not only more expensive, but also more comprehensive. However, even the most basic animation programs are capable of creating some amazing animations.
History of computer animation
As early as the 1940s and 50s, experiments in computer graphics were beginning, most notably by John Whitney -- but it was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by mid-1960s. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-dimensional imagery, though increasingly, as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-dimensional realism become the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in cinema movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
Contents
[hide]
- 1 The Earliest Pioneers: 40s to mid-60s
- 2 The New Pioneers: mid-60s to mid-70s
- 3 Towards 3-D: mid 70s to the 80s
- 4 The 3-D Breakout: the 90s and on
- 5 References
John Whitney, Sr, was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation.[1] In the 1940s and 1950s, he and brother James created a series of experimental films made with a custom-built device based on an analog computer that was used originally for gunnery control. One of Whitney's most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass. In 1960, Whitney established his company Motion Graphics Inc, which largely focused on producing titles for film and television, but also continued in further experimental works. All of John Whitney's sons (Michael, Mark and John Jr.) are also film-makers. John Whitney died in 1995.
From the late 1950s and early 1960s, mainframe digital computers were becoming commonplace within large organisations and universities, and increasingly these would be equipped with graphic plotting and graphics screen devices. Consequently, a new field of experimentation began to open up.
In 1960, William Fetter was a graphic designer for Boeing at Lawrence Livermore Labs, and was credited with coining the phrase "Computer Graphics" to describe what he was doing at Boeing at the time (though Fetter himself credited this to colleague Verne Hudson).[2] Fetter's work included the development of ergonomic descriptions of the human body that are both accurate and adaptable to different environments, and this resulted in the first 3-D animated wire-frame figures. Such human figures became one of the most iconic images of the early history of computer graphics, and often were referred to as the "Boeing Man". Fetter died in 2002.
Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was a leading research contributor in computer graphics, computer animation and electronic music from its beginnings in the early 1960s. Initially, researchers were interested in what the computer could be made to do, but the results of the visual work produced by the computer during this period established people like Edward Zajac, Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton as pioneering computer artists.
Edward Zajac produced one of the first computer generated films at Bell Labs in 1961, titled "A Two Gyro Gravity Gradient Altitude Control System", which demonstrated that a satellite could be stabilized to always have a side facing the earth as it orbited.[3]
Ken Knowlton developed the Beflix (Bell Flicks) animation system in 1963, which was used to produce dozens of artistic films by artists Stan VanDerBeek, Noll, Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz.[4] Instead of raw programming, Beflix worked using simple "graphic primitives", like draw a line, copy a region, fill an area, zoom an area, and the like.
In 1965, Michael Noll created computer-generated stereographic 3-D movies, including a ballet of stick figures moving on a stage.[5] Some movies also showed four-dimensional hyper-objects projected to three dimensions.[6] Around 1967, Noll used the 4D animation technique to produce computer animated title sequences for the commercial film short "Incredible Machine" (produced by Bell Labs) and the TV special "The Unexplained" (produced by Walt DeFaria).[7] Many projects in other fields were also undertaken at this time.
Ivan Sutherland is considered by many to be the creator of Interactive Computer Graphics, and an internet pioneer. He worked at the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1962, where he developed a program called "Sketchpad I", which allowed the user to interact directly with the image on the screen. This was the first Graphical User Interface, and is considered one of the most influential computer programs ever written by an individual. [8]
[edit] The New Pioneers: mid-60s to mid-70s
The University of Utah was a major center for computer animation in this period. The computer science faculty was founded by David Evans in 1965, and many of the basic techniques of 3D computer graphics were developed here in the early 1970's with ARPA funding (Advanced Research Projects Agency). Research results included Gouraud, Phong, and Blinn shading, texture mapping, hidden surface algorithms, curved surface subdivision, real-time line-drawing and raster image display hardware, and early virtual reality work. [9] In the words of Robert Rivlin in his 1986 book The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age, "almost every influential person in the modern computer-graphics community either passed through the University of Utah or came into contact with it in some way".[10]
In 1968, Ivan Sutherland teamed up with David Evans to found the company Evans & Sutherland -- both were professors in the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah, and the company was formed to produce new hardware designed to to run the systems being developed in the University. Many such algorithms have resulted in the generation of significant hardware implementation, including the SGI Geometry Engine, the Head Mounted Display, the modern frame buffer, and flight simulators. [11] Most of the employees were active or former students, and included Jim Clark, who started Silicon Graphics in 1981, Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar in 1979, and John Warnock of Adobe Systems in 1982.
In July 1968, the arts journal Studio International published a special issue titled "Cybernetic Serendipity - the computer and the arts", which brought together a comprehensive collection of items and examples of work being done in the field of computer art in organisations all over the world.[12] This marked a milestone in the development of the medium, and was considered by many to be of widespread influence and inspiration. Apart from all the examples mentioned above, two another particularly well-known iconic images from this include "Chaos to Order"[13] by Charles Csuri (often referred to as the Hummingbird), created at Ohio State University in 1967[14], and "Running Cola is Africa"[15] by Masao Komura and Koji Fujino created at the Computer Technique Group, Japan, also in 1967. [16]
The first machine to achieve widespread public attention in the media was Scanimate, an analog computer animation system designed and built by Lee Harrison of the Computer Image Corporation in Denver. From around 1969 onward, Scanimate systems were used to produce much of the video-based animation seen on television in commercials, show titles, and other graphics. Scanimate, and sister machines Caesar and Animac, were all "hybrid" designs, using analog principles for initial image generation, and digital principles for data storage and control of image manipulatons. This allowed these systems to create animations in real time, giving a great advantage of purely digital techniques at the time.[17]
The National Film Board of Canada, already a world center for animation art, also began experimentation with computer techniques in 1969.[18] Most well-known of the early pioneers with this was artist Peter Foldes, who completed "Metadata" in 1971. This film comprised drawings animated by gradually changing from one image to the next, a technique known as "interpolating" (also known as "inbetweening" or "morphing"), which also featured in a number of earlier art examples during the 1960s.[19] In in 1974, Foldes completed Hunger / La Faim, which was one of the first films to show solid filled (raster scanned) rendering, and was awarded the Jury Prize in the short film category at Cannes Film Festival, as well as an Academy Award nomination.
The Atlas Computer Laboratory near Oxford was for many years a major facility for computer animation in Britain.[20] The first entertainment cartoon made was "The Flexipede", by Tony Pritchett, which was first shown publicly at the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968.[21] Artist Colin Emmett and animator Alan Kitching first developed solid filled colour rendering in 1972, notably for the title animation for the BBC's The Burke Special TV program.
In 1973, Kitching went on to develop a software called Antics, which allowed users to create animation without needing any programming.[22] The package was broadly based on conventional "cel" (celluloid) techniques, but with a wide range of tools including camera and graphics effects, interpolation, use of skeleton figures and grid overlays. Any number of drawings or cels could be animated at once by "choreographing" them in limitless ways. At the time, only black & white plotter output was available, but Antics was able to produce full-color output by using the Technicolor Three-strip Process. Hence the name Antics was coined as an acronym for ANimated Technicolor-Image Computer System. [23] Antics was used for many animation works, culminating in the first complete documentary movie "Finite Elements", made for the Atlas Lab itself in 1975.[24]
From around the early 1970s, much of the emphasis in computer animation development was towards ever increasing realism in 3-D imagery, and on effects designed for use in feature movies.
The first feature film to use digital image processing was the 1973 movie Westworld, a science-fiction film in which humanoid robots live amongst the humans.[25] John Whitney, Jr, and Gary Demos at Information International, Inc. digitally processed motion picture photography to appear pixelized in order to portray the Gunslinger android's point of view. The cinegraphic block portraiture was accomplished using the Technicolor Three-strip Process to color-separate each frame of the source images, then scanning them to convert into rectangular blocks according to its tone values, and finally outputting the result back to film. The process was covered in the American Cinematographer article Behind the scenes of Westworld.[26]
[edit] Towards 3-D: mid 70s to the 80s
The first use of 3D Wireframe imagery in mainstream cinema was in the sequel to Westworld, Futureworld (1976), which featured a computer-generated hand and face created by then University of Utah graduate students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. The third movie to use this technology was Star Wars (1977) for the scenes with the wireframe Death Star plans and the targeting computers in the X-wings and the Millennium Falcon. The Black Hole (1979) used raster wire-frame model rendering to depict a black hole. The science fiction-horror film Alien of that same year also used a raster wire-frame model, in this case to render the image of navigation monitors in the sequence where a spaceship follows a beacon to a land on an unfamiliar planet.
In 1978, graduate students at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab began work on what would have been the first full-length CGI film, The Works, and a trailer for it was shown at SIGGRAPH 1982, but the film was never completed ("CGI" = Computer Graphics Imagery). Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan premiered a short CGI sequence called The Genesis Effect in June 1982. The first two films to make heavy investments in Solid 3D CGI, Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984), were commercial failures, causing most directors to relegate CGI to images that were supposed to look like they were created by a computer.
Another Star Trek movie - 1986's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - features a little-known use of CGI that would prove to be a major stepping stone for the technology in years to come. The dream-like sequence where Kirk and his crew (in a commandeered Klingon starship) travel back in time features computer-generated images of the crew's faces "morphing" into one another. Although the images look like clay sculptures, they represent the antecedents of the photo-realistic morphing that would become popular in the early 1990s, and the ILM team responsible would be sought out by James Cameron three years later (see below).
Computer Animation If you are looking for a career in the computer animation field, we hope we can help.
This site is dedicated to providing information about modern animation classes at schools either at a campus near you as well as convenient online courses and degree programs.
Computer animation is basically the process of using a computer to create the appearance of moving or still images. It has developed into a subset of different disciplines — computer graphics, animation and visual effects.
For the most part, computer animation is still animation, but just with some new, fancy tools. The difference between today’s digital animator and yesterday’s drawing on paper animator is the tool they use.
Computer animation can be called Computer Generated Imagery or CGI. CGI animation is the process of making images which appear to move through the help of modern computing tools.
Digital animation can be developed into either two dimensional or three dimensional graphics. Two dimensional work is used for low-bandwidth projects and fast rendering. Three dimensional (3D) animation takes the process one step further, allowing for better looking projects, but are slower to produce and require more bandwidth.
A good computer animator will possess the skills of a graphic designer and a computer software professional. Computer graphics professionals need to have both technology knowledge and creative skill.
This type of animation is used extensively in film and television, computer games, and on the Web. Producers of movies and television prefer to use animated techniques because they are less expensive and more controllable than real life scenes with extras and crowds or constructing miniatures or elaborate sets. Often, certain scenes couldn’t be produced with any other technology or than digital animation. When it comes to cost, a single graphic artist can often produce elaborate content without the use of actors or expensive sets.
Daily work for a designer typically involves working with software programs to produce original digital images or to reproduce images drawn by hand into a digital format.
A diploma or degree in this field will typically give you the necessary knowledge you need to start your career. You will learn drawing and the principles of color, shading and perspective. You will learn the essential software programs. You will work on the fundamentals of animation, texture mapping and motion capture, along with the differences between digital and real life and how that impacts the objects, characters and scenes in the virtual environments that you work in.
A computer animator is a specialist in a valued field, so average salaries are pretty good. If you can learn the job and produce good work, you can earn a good salary and have a nice career.
Good luck to you in whatever you decide and whatever career field you go into.
Computer Animation Software Reviews
It's not always easy to choose one software package over another. From user-friendliness to functionality, price to package features and extras, there are quite a few influencing factors in the decision of just which computer animation software to try out. This listing offers this Guide's opinion as to how various software packages stack up against each other, and rates them on a scale of one to five.
Animation Software Review: Adobe Flash CS5 The latest version of Flash brings the shiny.
Animation Software Review: Poser Pro 2010 3D Modeling & Anima… For less than $500 Poser Pro 2010 lets animators create content that nears the sophistication of basic models from high-end studio animation programs that cost thousands of doll
Types of Computer Animation X
Dennis Hartman
Dennis Hartman is a freelance writer living in California. His work covers a wide variety of topics and has been published nationally in print as well as online. Hartman holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and a Master of Arts from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
By Dennis Hartman, eHow Contributor
Types of Computer Animation
Artists have been using computers to make the process of animation faster, easier and more cost effective since the 1980s. Computer animation has also allowed for a new level of realism that could never have been achieved when animation was drawn by hand. Today computer animation exists in several distinct forms for serving different purposes.
Read more: Types of Computer Animation | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_5256092_types-computer-animation.html#ixzz1wQ9dl055
(Arrange By Usman Nadeem)
List Of Resource Locations In windows xp.
Here are a few common GUI changes/hacks, which most of the people want to make in Windows. In this tutorial, we'll tell you the exact location of these UI stuff, you want to change.
You need to open the mentioned files in Resource Hacker tool and then go to the mentioned resource location:
Changing look of RUN Dialog Box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1003 -> 1033.
Changing Progress Dialog Box (The box which appears while Copying/pasting/deleting stuffs)
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1020 -> 1033.
Changing look of Open With box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1063 -> 1033 & Dialog -> 1070 -> 1033.
Changing look of Classic Logoff dialog box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1071 -> 1033.
Changing look of Drive Properties box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1080 -> 1033 & Dialog -> 1081 -> 1033.
Changing look of New Logoff dialog box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1089 -> 1033.
Changing look of the box, which appears when Windows asks to select application/search with web service to open the UNKNOWN file type
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1091 -> 1033.
Changing look of Autoplay box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1119 -> 1033.
Changing look of Folder Customize box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1124 -> 1033.
Changing look of Windows Default CD Writing Wizard
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1125 to 1138 -> 1033.
Changing look of Classic Shutdown dialog box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 8226 -> 1033.
Changing look of About Windows dialog box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 14352 -> 1033.
Changing look of Format Drive dialog box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 28672 -> 1033.
Changing look of Scandisk dialog box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 28800 -> 1033.
Changing look of Desktop tab in Desktop Properties box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 29952 to 29956 -> 1033.
Changing look of Folder Options box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 29959 & 29960 -> 1033.
Changing look of DOS Properties box
Open %windir%\System32\shell32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 32768 - 32885 -> 1033.
Changing look of Taskbar & Start Menu Properties box
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: Dialog -> 6 to 1135 -> 1033.
Open %windir%\System32\Msgina.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1800 -> 1033.
Changing look of Shutdown Reason UI box
Open %windir%\System32\Msgina.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 2200 -> 1033.
Changing look of New Shutdown dialog box
Open %windir%\System32\Msgina.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 20100 -> 1033.
Changing look of Shutdown Timer box
Open %windir%\System32\WinLogon.exe file, and goto: Dialog -> 1300 -> 1033.
Changing look of System Properties box
Open %windir%\System32\Sysdm.cpl file, and goto: Dialog -> 41 to 4103 -> 1033.
Changing look of Choose Color box
Open %windir%\System32\Comdlg32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> CHOOSECOLOR -> 1033.
Changing look of Choose Font box
Open %windir%\System32\Comdlg32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 401 & 1543 -> 1033.
Changing look of Printer Properties box
Open %windir%\System32\Comdlg32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1538 & 1539 & 1546 -> 1033.
Changing look of Open/Save Dialog box
Open %windir%\System32\Comdlg32.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1547 * 1552 -> 1033.
Changing look of Many tabs in Desktop Properties box
Open %windir%\System32\ThemeUI.dll file, and goto: Dialog -> 1000 to 1017 -> 1033.
Changing look of Classic Programs Menu
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: Menu -> 204 -> 1033.
Changing look of Taskbar Context Menu
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: Menu -> 205 -> 1033.
Changing the Start button Text
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: String Table -> 37 -> 1033 -> 578 (For New Theme) & String Table -> 38 -> 1033 -> 595 (For Classic Theme).
Changing the Start Button Tool-Tip Text
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: String Table -> 51 -> 1033 -> 800.
Changing the Log off, Shutdown, Search, Help & Support, Run, etc. Text entries in New Start Menu
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: String Table -> 439 -> 1033.
Changing the Internet & E-Mail text in New Start Menu
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: String Table -> 440 -> 1033.
Changing the All Programs text in New Start Menu
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: String Table -> 515 -> 1033 -> 8226.
Changing Connect to, Control Panel, Favorites, My Recent Documents text entries in New Start Menu
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: String Table -> 515 -> 1033.
Changing Start Button Icon
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: Bitmap -> 143 -> 1033.
Changing Left-Side Image in Classic Start Menu
Open %windir%\Explorer.exe file, and goto: Bitmap -> 167 -> 1033.
NOTE: Here %windir% means C:\Windows\ folder. We assume that Windows is installed in C: drive in your system. If you installed Windows in some other drive, replace C: with the appropriate drive letter.