- Computer animation has in the last 25 years grown by leaps and bounds to forever secure a place in areas of our daily lives such as movies, advertising, television and the Internet. How artists take a static, unmoving image and bring it to life through animation can be a process almost as simple as drawing one of those old flip-book cartoons or as complicated as any film producer's job of finding the right light, shadow, time of day and location for shooting a movie.
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Computer animation is handled through software---sometimes simple and other times profoundly complex software that determines everything about the type of animation that can be produced. The two main types of computer animation are 2D and 3D.
2D animation is concerned with only two dimensions: height and width. When something is animated in 2D space, it looks the same no matter how you look at it or it is presented, because nothing else of it has been created. Homer Simpson and his family are an example 2D animation, though they have been rendered in 3D on occasion. 2D animations are given the illusion of being 3D (having depth) through artistic techniques and shading that seem to give curves.
3D animation also deals with height and width, but it also draws (or renders) in depth. This means that if you could physically grab an object that has been drawn in 3D off of your computer screen, it would feel solid and you could look at it from any angle and see what you would expect to see if it was real. -
2D animation software is much simpler than 3D and is handled with programs like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. These programs allow an artist to draw an object (sometimes called an actor) on a stage (the area where the animation will take place), and then, adjust it over time, frame-by-frame to give it the illusion of actual animation or motion, much like a movie. Controls for the frame rate (how many frames are seen each second) determine the speed of the animation.
3D animation is much more complicated and requires a stronger computer system and typically more expensive software such as 3D Studio Max or Maya. Programs like these are used to create 3D animated films like "Ice Age" and even the animated characters in live-action movies like "The Chronicles of Narnia." When a character is created in a 3D program, the artist is concerned with every angle and dimension of the character one time. When finished, the work is rendered or put through a memory-intensive, automated process by the computer program that logically analyzes the object and makes it usable. The item can then be used in almost any situation or movie without having to be drawn again, unlike 2D animation where you would have to draw a cartoon character sitting, standing, turned left, turned right and so on.
