Computer Animation

Animation means giving life to any object in computer graphics. It has the power of injecting energy and emotions into the most seemingly inanimate objects. Computer-assisted animation and computer-generated animation are two categories of computer animation. It can be presented via film or video.

The basic idea behind animation is to play back the recorded images at the rates fast enough to fool the human eye into interpreting them as continuous motion. Animation can make a series of dead images come alive. Animation can be used in many areas like entertainment, computer aided-design, scientific visualization, training, education, e-commerce, and computer art.

Animation Techniques

Animators have invented and used a variety of different animation techniques. Basically there are six animation technique which we would discuss one by one in this section.

Traditional Animation (frame by frame)

Traditionally most of the animation was done by hand. All the frames in an animation had to be drawn by hand. Since each second of animation requires 24 frames (film), the amount of efforts required to create even the shortest of movies can be tremendous.

Keyframing

In this technique, a storyboard is laid out and then the artists draw the major frames of the animation. Major frames are the ones in which prominent changes take place. They are the key points of animation. Keyframing requires that the animator specifies critical or key positions for the objects. The computer then automatically fills in the missing frames by smoothly interpolating between those positions.

Procedural

In a procedural animation, the objects are animated by a procedure − a set of rules − not by keyframing. The animator specifies rules and initial conditions and runs simulation. Rules are often based on physical a