What Is Computer Animation And Terms Breakdown

Blitheness is a method in which figures are manipulated to appear every bit moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on picture show. Today, most animations are made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Estimator blitheness can be very detailed 3D animation, while 2D figurer blitheness (which may have the look of traditional blitheness) can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth, or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a cease motion technique to two and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets, or clay figures.

Unremarkably, the effect of the animation is achieved by a rapid succession of sequential images that minimally differ from each other. The illusion—as in motion pictures in general—is idea to rely on the phi phenomenon and beta movement, only the exact causes are notwithstanding uncertain.

Animation is more than pervasive than many people know. Autonomously from curt films, feature films, television series, animated GIFs, and other media defended to the display of moving images, the animation is likewise prevalent in video games, motion graphics, user interfaces, and visual effects.

Common Computer Animation Terms

In this article, we bring yous some of the most commonly used terms in animation.

ACCENTS: Animators need to "hitting the accents" in a line of dialogue. By "accents", we're non talking here about a regional accent – say a British or French emphasis – we're talking about making it articulate in the poses that the grapheme is speaking the line of dialogue. In this example, an "accent" is the office of the line of dialogue that has an emphasis and needs to exist punctuated.

Accents can be difficult or soft. What is the difference betwixt a hard emphasis and a soft accent? In blitheness terms, a soft emphasis eases in, and a hard accent bounces dorsum.

ACTING: Acting for blitheness is the art of taking on board the personality and graphic symbol traits of another and translating them to a previously inanimate object, a CG model, a puppet, or a drawing. It is moving these in such a way as to pb your audience to believe that this 'thing' can think for itself.

It is nigh expected that an animated character because it is non 'real' tin can exaggerate motion or the timing and apprehension of that motion. All animation works with this convention. All forms of blitheness offer the animator the opportunity to create minutiae of movements, although some are more than costly (in terms of time) than others. With end-motion and drawn animation, each matter that moves has to be worked by manus merely with CG there is the opportunity to let the software lend a helping paw. This means that you can accept a CG character that has motion in every frame, but a stop-motion puppet that moves without a pause seemingly is less believable. A stop-motion puppet should be allowed to rest or remain motionless from fourth dimension to time. It is ameliorate to let a gesture read, and to concord, than for a character to remain on the motion constantly.

Ambience Occlusion: In graphics, ambient occlusion is a shadowing technique used to brand 3D objects wait more realistic by simulating the soft shadows that should naturally occur when indirect or ambient lighting is cast out onto your scene. Ambience occlusion shading is fake indirect shadows that are added into the render by rays that become bandage out from each surface on your geometry. If these rays come into contact with another surface, that area will become darker. If they don't observe another surface, the area will stay brighter.

Ambience occlusion is corking for softening the overall lighting in your scene if it's besides bright. In that location is no demand to add additional lights because ambience occlusion does not work in the aforementioned way as "final gather" which must use a light source to cast out rays. Ambient occlusion is also great for visualizing a model that hasn't even been textured yet.

ANIMATIC: An animatic is a cord of storyboard images edited together with audio to illustrate how a sequence will flow in motion. It's a side by side-level technique after storyboarding. They aren't always necessary, but they do provide a fuller sense of what the finished project will wait like. While animatics are usually all the time in blitheness, even live-action films will use them, specially for complex action or visual effects scenes.

Animatic	Storyboard
An animatic is an animated storyboard. The same images y'all've already created as a storyboard are now put into a video and can include dialogue, sound effects, and music. It requires a storyboard to be completed beforehand only there is a clear departure between a storyboard and an animatic.	A storyboard is a visual representation of a flick sequence and breaks downwardly the action into individual panels. It is a rough approximation of how the sequence will unfold. A storyboard is like to a trial run for your finished film, video, or commercial in what looks like a comic book.

Animation LAYER: In animation and graphics software, layers refer to the different levels on which you identify your drawings, animations, and objects. The layers are stacked one on top of another. Each layer contains its graphics or effects, which can be worked on and inverse independently of the other layers. Together all the layers combine for a complete graphic or animation.

In most cases, when you open up a new file in a software program, you run into only the base layer of the file. Y'all could do all your work there, but you lot would end up with a flattened file that is difficult to edit and work with. When yous add together layers on summit of the base of operations layer every bit you piece of work, you lot expand the possibilities of what you lot can do with the software.

Mental attitude: The feelings and thoughts of your grapheme! When you lot animate you should e'er have articulate in mind the type of attitude he/she has to ameliorate perform the scene!

Background: In traditional blitheness, a background layout is the line drawing of the background for a scene. Information technology is not the finished background painted in a colour that you see on the screen.

Layouts are drawn from storyboards that ascertain the action and perspective in the scene. Considering storyboard artists draw backgrounds in a rough, simplified style, background layout artists take them to the adjacent level by defining the detail and perspective. Layout drawings are then given to the background painters to colour and consummate the visual manner.

Depending upon the style of the moving-picture show or bear witness, the lines of the layout drawings may be visible in the finished background that is used in the final production. Or the visual mode may exist void of the linework, thus the layouts serve equally a guide for the painters.

Balance: It is a principle of design; the arrangement of elements that makes individual parts of composition appear equally important; an arrangement of the elements to create an equal distribution of visual weight throughout the format or composition. If a composition appears top- or bottom-heavy and/or anchored by weight to one side, it is not visually balanced.

Types of balance:

Symmetrical residue (or Symmetry) means that the work of art is the same on one side every bit the other, a mirror epitome of itself, on both sides of a heart line.
Asymmetrical residuum (or Asymmetry) ways that the ii halves of the work of fine art are different, however, endeavour to create residuum. In other words, although the sides may not be exactly the same, there will exist elements that interact in a fashion that makes each side every bit important.
Radial symmetry means the weight of the image or form radiates from a center betoken.

Alloy SHAPES: Blend shapes create the illusion that one shape changes into another in a natural-looking manner. Yous might use 1, for instance, to animate a character's mouth moving from a neutral shape into a grinning.

This works past using a duplicated version of the object, which is so manually adjusted to another shape. Y'all tin and then use alloy shapes to alloy or morph betwixt these, and it creates the illusion of an object changing its form.

Using this method, animators can mix and match blendshapes to form whatsoever number of combinations between the prepared and linked blendshapes. A frown tin be mixed with a smiling to grade an apologetic expression. A blendshape with pursed lips can be mixed with frowning eyes to form an expression of decision or a look of disapproval.

Trunk MECHANICS: Body mechanics is the way nosotros move when we walk, run, take the stairs, and then on… How the body reacts and moves during these actions!

Character animation at its very basic level is substantially recreating real-life movements, whether it's second blitheness or 3D. Sure, much of this consists of exaggerating these real-life actions to increase the appeal and to create something more entertaining to sentry. It'south our task, as animators, to understand how the human being trunk moves and reacts, not only that but as well there, sometimes some fourth dimension nigh how animals and fifty-fifty inanimate objects behave. To understand animation, and to create conceivable movements, we must study how things in the world move.

BREAKDOWN: Breakdowns are the large gaps between the keys. By placing fundamental action on breakdowns, yous can loosen up your animation, and offload a lot of your animation work onto an inbetween drawing – which is far easier than creating notwithstanding another key.

Here are some sample images from the handout. This thumbnail is pretty clean (cleaner than information technology really needs to be – yours can exist much looser, as long as you can follow the activeness). The two keys are on #1 and #21, the breakdown in red, with the antic and overshoot in blue. With this i epitome, the physical action is pre-animated! The timing guess below also allows yous to plan out the timing and spacing of the unabridged scene in one image.

The breakdown here is #viii (in scarlet). Notice how the head moves down while the arm moves up. It's the breakdown that creates the flexibility of the action and stops it from beingness a bland tween.

BREAKING JOINTS: Breaking joints basically refers to rotating joints in the opposite direction to their normal bending. In the existent globe, this wouldn't be physically possible without actually breaking a joint. In animation, bending the joints in the opposite direction volition add a lot of flexibility to a move, and is typically used for a more cartoony manner animation. Since you lot're but breaking the joint for a frame or 2 when played back at total speed it isn't noticeable. It is closely related to the principle of overlapping action, just applied to an entire chain, similar an arm for instance.

CAMERA SHAKE: Camera shake is a term used to define the act of accidentally shaking a camera during shooting due to unsteady hands, which results in blurry images. This generally occurs more often if you're shooting on a low shutter speed or with a heavy lens, and can be avoided by using a tripod and cablevision release setup.

Shaky camera shots tin exist a cracking addition to car chase scenes or in any other scene that tries to highlight movement. Filming a perfectly still shot, and adding the camera milk shake event in post-production is probably the best way to make sure you'll end upwards with a great final cut of your video.

CHANNEL BOX: The term channel is, for the about part, interchangeable with attributes. Yous can think of a channel equally a container that holds the attribute's value. The Channel Box is an editor that lists a node's attributes for quick access. The Channel Box displays the node'south attributes, which are most often keyframed for animation.

CONSTRAINT: An animation constraint is a special type of controller that can help you automate the animation process. Yous can employ constraints to control an object's position, rotation, or scale through a binding relationship with some other object.

A constraint requires an blithe object and at to the lowest degree ane target object. The target imposes specific blitheness limits on the constrained object.

For case, to rapidly animate an airplane flying along a predefined path, you can employ a Path constraint to restrict the aeroplane's movement to a spline.

Y'all tin use keyframe animation to toggle the constraint'southward binding relationship with its targets over a period of time.

Common uses for constraints include:

Linking i object to another over a period of time, such as a graphic symbol's hand picking up a baseball bat
Linking an object'south position or rotation to 1 or several objects
Keeping an object's position betwixt two or more objects
Constraining an object along a path or between multiple paths
Constraining an object to a surface
Making an object point toward another object
Keeping an object's orientation in relation to another

Wheel/LOOP: In animation, a walk cycle is a series of frames or illustrations drawn in a sequence that loop to create an animation of a walking graphic symbol. The walk cycle is looped over and over, thus having to avert animating each step again.

Walk cycles tin be broken upwardly into 4 key frames, namely Forrard Contact Indicate, Passing Pose1, Back Contact Point, and Passing Pose 2. Frames that are drawn between these key poses (traditionally known equally in-betweens/Inbetweening) are either paw-fatigued or use estimator software to interpolate them.

DYNAMIC SIMULATION: Dynamics is the simulation of motion through the application of the principles of physics. Instead of assigning keyframes to objects to animate them, you lot assign concrete characteristics that define how an object behaves in a fake globe. The dynamic bodies are converted from the objects created, and defined through dynamic attributes, which affect how the objects behave in a dynamic simulation. With dynamic simulation, yous tin can create many impressive effects such as explosion, overflowing, tempest, tornado, ocean, etc., for animations and computer games.

EXTREMES: Extremes are drawings or images that are at the beginning and the end of a pose. They are too known equally preliminary drawings. Extremes refer to the farthest posture of a character. They as well refer to the effect in a management of motion. There is a difference between extremes and keys and too between extremes and breakdowns.

FADE IN / FADE OUT: The Fade In/Fade Out behavior lets you dissolve into and out of whatsoever object by ramping the opacity of the object from 0 percent to 100 percent at the start, and so back to 0 percent at the terminate. You can eliminate the fade-in or fade-out result by setting the elapsing of the Fade In Time or Fade Out Fourth dimension to 0 frames.

The Fade In/Fade Out beliefs is useful for introducing and removing animated elements. For example, you can apply the Fade In/Fade Out behavior to text that moves across the screen to make it fade into existence, and then fade abroad at the cease of its duration.

FISH EYES (in posing): How do yous make a bare stare fifty-fifty blanker? Have the character'due south eyes face slightly (or even more than slightly) away from each other — opposite cross-optics, if you will. It's commonly used to make the graphic symbol wait unintelligent or dumbfounded, causing it to become known as "derp eyes" in some Internet circles. In real-world English, this is called "wall-eye" or "squint", and in medical jargon "exotropia".

Sometimes, nevertheless, they can exist used for a more serious effect, such as showing that a character'southward mental stability is loosening, emphasizing an emotion (commonly acrimony or happiness); sometimes this is done when a character mocks another, or to emphasize that they act in a manner unlike they usually do. They may occasionally be the result of plain old physical eye damage.

FK – IK (FORWARD AND INVERSE KINEMATICS): Forrard kinematics uses a top-downwards method, where you lot begin by positioning and rotating parent objects and work down the hierarchy positioning and rotating each child object.

Basic principles of forward kinematics include:

Hierarchical linking from parent to child.
Pivot points defining joints between objects.
Children inheriting the transforms of their parents.

These principles are fairly forgiving. As long as everything is linked together and the pivots are located at joint locations, you can successfully animate the construction.

Changed kinematics (IK) uses a goal-directed method, where y'all position a goal object and 3ds Max calculates the position and orientation of the terminate of the chain. The final position of the hierarchy, after all of the calculations, take been solved, is called the IK solution. There are a variety of IK solvers that can be applied to a hierarchy.

Inverse kinematics starts with linking and pivot placement every bit its foundation and then adds the post-obit principles:

Joints tin be limited with specific positional and rotational backdrop.
The position and orientation of parent objects are determined by the position and orientation of child objects.

Because of these additions, IK requires greater thought about how you link your objects and identify pivots. Where many different solutions for linking objects may exist suitable for forward kinematics, there are usually just a few proficient solutions for whatever given IK arroyo.

Inverse kinematics is often easier to use than forward kinematics, and you can quickly create circuitous motions. If y'all demand to edit those motions later, information technology can be simpler to revise the animation if you lot are using IK. Information technology also is the best manner to simulate weight in an blitheness.

FOREGROUND: An element that is up close and usually partially illustrated with the remainder of the object situated off the page. The foreground is used in conjunction with the mid-ground and background areas of an surroundings.

FRAME Charge per unit (FPS): Frame rate, is the speed at which those images are shown, or how fast you "flip" through the book. Information technology's usually expressed as "frames per second," or FPS. So if a video is captured and played dorsum at 24fps, that means each second of the video shows 24 singled-out still images.

Frame rate profoundly impacts the manner and viewing experience of a video. Different frame rates yield different viewing experiences, and choosing a frame rate often ways thinking about multiple factors, such as how realistic you want your video to wait or whether or not you plan to employ techniques like tiresome motion or move-mistiness effects.

GHOSTING: Ghost objects let you see how an animation moves through a scene. Dissimilar Motion Trails, which only employ a line to illustrate where an animated object moves, a ghost object shows a semi-transparent representation of the object at the points in time y'all specify. Cached playback lets you ghost deformed meshes, and improves the speed of playback.

The opacity and the colour of ghosts make information technology like shooting fish in a barrel to differentiate between the individual frames of your animation. Past default, the opacity gradient ramps down linearly from the ghost closest to the current frame to the ghost farthest away.

GIMBAL LOCK: A gimbal is a pivoted support that may rotate freely along a single axis. When yous combine three gimbals, you lot achieve the most usually observed organisation: Pitch, Yaw, and Ringlet (or XYZ as you're probably more than used to seeing it.) Merely put, Gimbal Lock is the loss of one degree of liberty which occurs when ii gimbals are rotating parallel to each other. Gimbals never actually "lock" — which makes the task of managing this issue that much easier. Equally information technology is experienced in 3D animation, there are many ways to overcome this annoyingly common obstacle.

HOOK Up or CONTINUITY: Animators are commonly assigned to work on single shots on a projection, which means in that location will be another shot, animated past another animator, on either side of theirs. These shots must play together in continuity, meaning that there must be a smoothen flow from one to some other. The pose of a character at the end of 1 shot should be the same pose in the next shot, or else the shots won't "hook up".

In animation terms, hookups are about continuity, and on a film projection, information technology is the animator's responsibleness to make sure that their shot hooks up with the shots on either side of theirs.

IDLE: By and large used in games, is a bicycle where a grapheme just stands and breathes! Nosotros tin use whatsoever type of pose nosotros demand (a neutral pose or an action pose) and it is conceived to exist shown as an infinite loop!

These sorts of animations are largely popular with action games, where players may rarely exist idle and thus serve as easter eggs. Some of the first games ever to introduce idle animations on a mainstream basis were Door Door and Maziacs; the sprite taps his feet, blinks, and sits down. This tendency spread to many other activeness genre games, becoming more complex every bit allowed by the advancing hardware. For example, in Donkey Kong State 2: Diddy'south Kong Quest, Diddy Kong juggles a few balls if the player offers no controller input for a few seconds.

Idle animations in modernistic 3D games are used to go along them realistic. In general, games meant for younger audiences are far more likely to have complex or humorous idle animations, while games for older people tend to accept more basic idle animations. For example, in Super Mario 64, Mario will occasionally wait around, and eventually fall asleep, while in other games, steady breathing suffices every bit an idle animation.

INBETWEEN/TWEENING: Inbetweening, also commonly known as tweening, is a process in animation that involves generating intermediate frames, called inbetweens, between two keyframes. The intended result is to create the illusion of movement by smoothly transitioning 1 image into some other.

Key POSES: These are the key moments that your character must show in the scene. Without these Key Poses, the actions or story may not be equally strong or even lost in translation. Key Poses are the almost important action in your scene. If done right, it will properly evidence the audience the character's emotions and actions of the scene.

LINE OF Activeness: Line of action is an imaginary line that describes the direction and motion of a graphic symbol's trunk and is the leading forcefulness of his activity. A good line of action improves the character'due south poses, makes the character look more than dynamic, energetic, and alive. Information technology tin can also affect the staging and composition of the scene. Poses with a skillful line of action are clearer and more understandable for the audition. There are 3 types of lines of activeness, the C, opposite C, and S curves.

LOCATOR: Locators are similar the Swiss army knife of 3D; playing a primal role in animation, it serves many of import functions: targets, controllers, parents, manipulators, selectors, and even joints. Since locators are merely items, they accept their ain set of properties, the about important being their own transforms, and as such, they can be positioned and animated independently of Mesh Items in a scene. This might not seem and so heady past itself, every bit locators don't fifty-fifty render, simply when working with constraints, modifiers, and influences, you quickly discover how useful they really are, serving as the virtual backbone of whatsoever rigging setup. As such, there are some special properties associated specifically with locators.

MODEL Canvass: In visual arts, a model sheet, too known as a grapheme board, character sail, character written report, or simply a study, is a document used to help standardize the appearance, poses, and gestures of a graphic symbol in arts such equally animation, comics, and video games.

Model sheets are required when multiple artists are involved in the product of an animated picture, game, or comic to assist maintain continuity in characters from scene to scene. In blitheness, ane animator may merely practise 1 shot out of the several hundred that are required to consummate an blithe characteristic film.

MOMENTUM: Information technology is a physics principle based on the character's motion depending on its mass and velocity. Is the impulse, the boost, the power of the movement! Momentum besides depends on the direction of the motion then deflecting a moving object is considered a change of momentum. The principle of Forcefulness and Momentum says that an unbalanced force will change an object'due south momentum; the bigger the forcefulness, the quicker the momentum changes. For moving characters, this modify in momentum could result in increasing or decreasing a grapheme's speed or it could be a modify in direction (such every bit making a turn). Among physicists, the principle of Force and Momentum is known as Newton'southward Second Law of Motility.

Motility BLUR: Motion blur is the apparent streaking of moving objects in a photograph or a sequence of frames, such as a film or animation. It results when the image being recorded changes during the recording of a single exposure, due to rapid movement or long exposure.

In estimator blitheness, this effect must be faux as a virtual camera actually does capture a discrete moment in time. This simulated motion blur is typically practical when either the camera or objects in the scene move rapidly.

Movement CAPTURE – MOCAP: It is the process of digitally recording the movement of people. It is used in entertainment, sports, medical applications, ergonomics, and robotics. In film-making and game evolution, it refers to recording the actions of actors for animations or visual effects. A famous example of a movie with lots of move capture technology is Avatar. When information technology includes full body, face, and fingers or captures subtle expressions, information technology is too referred to as performance capture.

MOVING Agree: A "moving hold" is basically just a way to have your character concur a key pose for a long time without looking expressionless. Moving holds can be really tricky. It'due south so easy to take your grapheme moving as well much, giving the performance a floaty CG feel, or to take the character freeze likewise much, which is instant expiry, especially in CG animation. Yous've worked and then difficult to convince your audition that your character is a living, thinking, feeling being, but no matter how much you've sucked them in, a frozen character instantly appears expressionless, and all your hard work goes down the drain as the audience remembers they're just looking at a cartoon.

OVERLAPPING Action: It is a tool used by animators to emphasize the activeness and mood of the character. When a graphic symbol moves across the screen some parts of the trunk movement before or at different rates than others. Some parts of the body volition lead the action and some parts volition follow the main action.

OVERSHOOT: This principle says that any object that is stopping, will miss the cease signal a bit before stopping eventually, reminds a pendulum a little. to understand this in a quick way yous could try it for yourself: put your right arm in front of yous and brand a fist while the arm stays direct.

PAN-PANNING (CAMERA): Panning is moving the camera across a wide background and stopping at significant spots where the action is taking place. To pan scenes in Flash, simply create a background prototype that is significantly larger than the phase. Create a motion tween that moves the image across the visible portion of the stage.

PASSING POSITION: The passing position is the mid-mode position betwixt two keys. In all other actions, the outset inbetween position between two keys would be called a breakdown. With walks, information technology is known as passing position.

The passing position is where the abaft leg is coming halfway through to the forepart while the body is lifted upwardly over the straight contact leg and the arms are pretty much by the sides.

PHONEMES: Phonemes are the smallest individual units of sound that are combined to form spoken communication. A phoneme shape refers to the position of the lips, teeth, natural language, and jaw required to utter a phoneme or a specific audio of speech communication.

For instance, the phoneme shape for the phoneme /m/ consists of lips that are pressed together, whereas the phoneme shape for /l/ consists of lips that are non circular and that are slightly apart, with the tip of the tongue pressed lightly to the gums behind the upper teeth.

POSE TO POSE: Pose to pose is a term used in animation, for creating key poses for characters and then inbetweening them in intermediate frames to make the character appear to move from 1 pose to the next. Pose-to-pose is used in traditional animation as well as estimator-based 3D animation.