The Mesmerizing World of Animation
The world of Animation and VFX has never ceased to amaze its admirers. Whenever you watch an animated movie, the concealed scientific treasure must have tickled your brain cells for at least a thousand times. I could make out that the characters weren’t real people acting, but didn’t know what the gods of that virtual world did, to make that world and the characters so full of life. For the animation enthusiasts, or even those who just like watching animated movies or movies with visual effects, this post will give an introduction to what animation is, and how it developed.
What is Animation?
Animation is the process of making the illusion of motion and the illusion of change by means of the rapid succession of sequential images that differ very little from each other. This phenomenon of perceiving motion from a series of still images is called the ‘phi phenomenon’ and its reasons are still unknown.
This animation is a series of these 15 still images at a rate of 15 frames per second.
The earliest proof of people trying to depict motion through images can be found in cave paintings. Ancient Chinese records also contain references to devices depicting motion. Later on, in the 19th-century devices like the phenakistoscope, zoetrope and praxinoscope came up that showed a series of pictures to simulate moving birds and animals.
Flipbook animation is a technique where many pictures are drawn in succession on the pages of a book and the pages are flipped through quickly. A major development came in this technology with the advent of motion pictures.
The earliest animation used in motion pictures was Traditional Animation (or Cel Animation) where each frame was drawn by hand on paper and recorded onto film. This technique became obsolete in the 21st century. Now all the drawings are made directly on a computer.
The world’s first complete animation film using Cel technique is Fantasmagorie.
An example of traditional animation movie is ‘The Lion King (1994)’.
Another technique is stop-motion animation where real-world manipulable models are created and are photographed one frame at a time to create the illusion of motion. Stop-motion animation is less expensive and more time-consuming than computer animation.
The most recent form is Computer animation which has a number of techniques but the common factor is that it is created digitally on a computer. It may be 2D or 3D.
3D animation involves modeling and manipulating all the characters and their environment. This begins by creating a 3D polygon mesh. A mesh is a structure consisting of vertices connected by edges or faces. To manipulate characters, their meshes are given a skeleton called armature and the different body parts are given weights, i.e. assigned to the skeleton. This process is called rigging. Other techniques under this include mathematical formulation to simulate physical processes or object, such as gravity, collisions, water simulation, wind, particles, fire, hair, and fur.
The world’s first completely animated 3D feature film was Toy Story by Disney and Pixar.
Alright, so this was a gist about the deep world of animation and VFX. The steady development of this field can be judged by the fact that studio giants across the world are spending loads of bucks on maintaining their own research department.
Stay tuned for more exciting insights into the world of technology!
Karthik Iyer & Ishan Shandilya, IIT Roorkee
