I was in a confusion that why animations are so important in movies. Does movies have any effect using animations. In the early days animation was sketchy at best. The most we could have hoped for was less than realistic images of giant lizards and insects that terrorized the countryside. That all changed when computers came into being. The computer age helped to blur the line between fantasy and reality to give us the movies that we love so much. Using the newest technology allowed filmmakers to bring to the screen that which was deemed impossible in the early days of movies. When the special effects are a part of the movies animations are compulsory. The animation of his characters in the first film gave people their first glimpse of the future and the movie was an overnight sensation. Many of the science fiction films came in early and middle eighties. This also spawned many companies based on the new technology that are still sought out to make dreams and imagination come true. The movie animation business is now a billion dollar a year industry that employs some of the best animators and computer specialists in the entire world. This is how the world was brought the hit movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? This film was the first of its kind where animated characters or cartoon characters interacted with the human characters in the entire story line. This was a new concept that was a smash hit in its time. The world had never seen anything like it and the trickery of the camera made everyone believe that they could touch and see a cartoon character like they did in the movie. Today the animation in movies is far more advanced. Where filmmakers were once limited to making only two-dimensional animated characters the norm now is three dimensional, fully interactive animated characters that dominate the screen. The first real advancement in this technology was the movie Toy Story. This film was created on a computer and featured no human presence in the film itself besides the voice over. The world was treated to the future of animation and movies with this film and it became an over night success.

I would always feel that how hard the animators work and how the animations are made. I have gone through the basic research on Internet in which I found one of the good software used for animations that is MAYA. And I would like to share my research on animations. Let us see some of the essential forms of computer animation that use the software called Maya.

Key frame Animation

This is the essential, fundamental form of computer animation. The model is placed in a starting pose or position, and a keyframe is set. Some frames later, another keyframe is set, and the model is moved as desired. This process is repeated as many times as needed. The animation software interpolates the motion needed to move the model smoothly between the keyframes. What this means is that if the animator keys a box, and moves the box across the room in the next keyframe, when the scene is scrubbed or viewed, the box will glide across the floor instead of jumping from frame to frame. This applies to anything in the scene - moving fingers, eyelids, moving lips, etc.

Nonlinear Animation

In Maya, there are two types of clip: source clips and regular clips. Maya preserves and protects a character’s original animation curves by storing them in source clips. Moving, manipulating, and blending regular clips to produce a smooth series of motions for a character is the basis of nonlinear animation. The tool with which you manage all these aspects of a character’s nonlinear animation is the Trax Editor.

Path Animation

A path animation controls the position and rotation of an object along a curve. An object must first be attached to the curve for it to become a path curve. You can also generate motion paths by animating objects using motion path keys.

Skeletons

Skeletons are hierarchical, articulated structures that let you pose and animate bound models. A skeleton provides a deformable model with a similar underlying structure as the human skeleton gives the human body. Just like in the human body, the location of joints and the number of joints you add to a skeleton determine how the skeleton’s bound model or `body’ moves. When you bind a model to a skeleton, it is called skinning. The process of making a skeleton or bones, refining the joints, using IK or FK, putting handles on the joints so animators can manipulate them, and over all making the model ready for animation is called “Rigging”

Skinning

Skinning is the process of setting up a character’s model so that it can be deformed by a skeleton.

Constraints

Constraints enable you to constrain the position, orientation, or scale of an object to other objects. Further, with constraints you can impose specific limits on objects and automate animation processes.

Technology used from the broadcast and print media to the multimedia is advancing almost every day. Animation in the movies and television is just one example. Animation is responsible for the funny, adorable and sometimes-tough cartoon characters we love to see on TV and in the movies. Before, it the making of cartoons was just done manually (drawn by hand) but now, computer animation is the latest trend. Walt Disney used to be synonymous to cartoons but today; numerous companies have gotten into the business of animation. The latest buzz is that Disney Animation officers are planning to return the Walt Disney studios in Burbank, California to its original status as an exclusive hand-drawn animation company. “Lilo and Stitch” was Disney’s last hand-drawn and big hit animated film. Computer animation makes use of two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics. When used in films, it is referred to as computer generated imagery or imaging (CGI). This digital technology has somehow replaced the stop motion animation of 3D models and frame-by-frame animation of two-dimensional illustrations.

In making 3D animations, objects or models are normally built on the computer monitor and 3D figures are manipulated with a so-called virtual skeleton. For 2D animations, separate drawings and separate transparent layers are used even without a virtual skeleton.

Computer-animated films usually cover animal characters such as in “Finding Nemo,” fantasy characters like “Shrek” and “Monsters, Inc.” as well as humans that are still cartoons such as “The Incredibles.” A more realistic simulation of humans has been attempted via the movie “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” but it needs further improvement.

Other than the U.S., another highly developed country that has a great fascination for animation is Japan. Anime (short for animation) in Japan became famous because of its unique format of storytelling compared to the country’s live-action industry. Japan is known for its robot anime like the Gundam, Voltes V and Mazinger Z that became classics in the 1980s. The origin of Japanese anime can be traced to the early 20th century when Yamamoto explored the techniques in animation that were being done in Germany, France, Russia and the United States at that time. Anime has also been greatly influenced by the Japanese manga and light novels and covers genres such as action, adventure, children’s stories, drama, comedy, fantasy, horror, science fiction and romance. Animation companies actually have a staff of creative people who can really draw well. Some of them have also outsourced their services and have put up offices in countries whose citizens are blessed with great talent in drawing and have a passion for animation.

In today’s market, it’s becoming more and more important to catch people’s attention quickly before they click away. Flash allows you to convey additional meanings to your message, more than just print or static images allow. Movement accentuates emotion, or can eliminate the need for emotion, depending on the purpose, allowing your message to be delivered to the consumer with less room for interpretation on their part. A mini-commercial for your website. If people read it, see it in action and hear it, they are more likely to remember it in the future. People love entertainment. If you can entertain and educate people they will be more likely to desire your product and services. Consumers will be more likely to stay on your website to find out more if you can capture and intrigue them.

Flash allows you to be funny, excited, determined and many other emotions, at the same time of showcasing what your company provides. This helps differentiate your business from all the others. Consumers are inundated with information that sounds and looks the same as the last guys. Flash animation gives you a chance to showcase what you do best, but you need a professional to do it. There is a tendency for many inexperienced web designers to go flash crazy. Your audience can only look at one thing at a time.

Too much flash confuses the consumer and makes your website difficult to navigate. If you overload them, or have flash that takes too long to upload, the consumer will click away and you may lose them for good. A professional graphic artist can design animation that accentuates the message, at the same time entertaining and educating the audience.

Maya is a high-end 3D computer graphics and 3D modeling software package originally developed by Alias Systems Corporation, but now owned by Autodesk as part of the Media and Entertainment division. Maya is used in the film and TV industry, as well as for computer and video games. Maya is a popular, integrated node-based 3D software suite, evolved from Wavefront Explorer and Alias Power Animator using technologies from both. The software is released in two versions: Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited.

Maya was originally released for the IRIX operating system, and subsequently ported to the Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. IRIX support was discontinued after the release of version 6.5. When Autodesk acquired Alias in October 2005, they continued Maya development. The latest version, 2008 (9.0), was released in September 2007.

An important feature of Maya is its openness to third-party software, which can strip the software completely of its standard appearance and, using only the kernel, can transform it into a highly customized version of the software. Apart from its intrinsic power and flexibility, this feature in itself made Maya appealing to large studios that tend to write custom code for their productions using the provided software development kit. The core of Maya itself is written in C++. Project files, including all geometry and animation data, are stored as sequences of MEL operations which can be optionally saved as a ‘human readable’ file (.ma, for Maya ASCII), editable in any text editor outside of the Maya environment which allows for a tremendous level of flexibility when working with external tools. A marking menu is built into larger menu system called Hotbox that provides instant access to a majority of features in Maya at the press of a key.

Do you have interest in doing something new or experimenting with computers? then I would suggest you to opt an animations related career because there is a wide arena of opportunities in this field to be pursued as a future career. This is probably because computers are considered to be an integral part of the human existence, especially in the developed and developing countries. It has become imperative for every person to have basic knowledge of this interactive machine.

One of the very challenging areas in the computer field, which involves much more creativity, is computer animation. Animation finds its place in many areas but it is most commonly used in the filming industry, where creativity is used to animate the inanimate objects or characters that are created through drawing. With the use of media such as television and the Internet for advertisement and propaganda, animation will find its use not only in the filming industry but also the visual advertisement industry. The two-dimensional and three-dimensional techniques used in animation are being used to create newer and livelier effects by the film makers and television stations to bring about a change in the way television channels or movies are being watched by the people.

As most of us know that animation finds its place in the filming industry and in television but there are several other areas that animation plays a large part in. The biggest scope for animation comes from the gaming industry. The typical roles for people pursuing animation as a career in computers, depending upon their skill sets, includes digital film animator, visual artists, graphics designer, senior animator, web artist or web designer. The basic requisites for animation as a career, apart from knowing the basics in computer education, involve an extraordinary aptitude and amazing versatility in drawing. An individual who enjoys drawing and computers could easily make a successful career out of computer animation. Those animators who obtain a higher level of education are usually the ones who are offered the better positions as they come available.

The career in animation will be more than rewarding for a person that is full of creativity and it offers a true sense of satisfaction when you see how much others appreciate your work.

One contemporary example of suspension of disbelief is the audience’s acceptance that Superman hides his identity from the world by simply donning a pair of glasses, conservative clothing, and acting in a “mild-mannered” fashion. Not only is the disguise so thin as to be ridiculous, but also in the TV series, Adventures of Superman, this absurdity was carried to an extreme. Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen constantly suspected Clark Kent of being Superman, yet when obvious evidence was right in their faces — such as times when Clark was missing his glasses — they never saw the resemblance.

Strangely, while some audience members took issue with the flimsiness of Superman’s disguise, they didn’t take issue with the idea of the existence of a super being whose only weakness was kryptonite. One defending suspension of disbelief might say that flying, along with the rest of Superman’s abilities, is a foundational premise regarding the character, which the audience accepted as part of the deal at the beginning.

Another major example of suspended disbelief was The Flintstones cartoon series. The characters have televisions, cars, telephones, and various appliances that would be powered by electricity in modern society, The show was set in “prehistoric” times and there was no mention of electricity. The “prehistoric” characters were even shown to celebrate Christmas and travel into the future.

Gary Larson discussed the question with regard to his comic strip, The Far Side; he noted that readers wrote him to complain that a male mosquito referred to his “job” sucking blood when it is in fact the females that drain blood, but that the same readers accepted that the mosquitoes live in houses, wear clothes, and speak English.

A Flash animation is an animated film, which is created using Adobe Flash animation software and often distributed in the .swf file format. It can be created in Flash or with other programs capable of writing .swf files. The term Flash animation refers to the file format but to a certain kind of movement and visual style, which, in many circles, is seen as simplistic or unpolished. However, with dozens of Flash animated television series, countless more Flash animated television commercials, and award-winning online shorts in circulation, Flash animation is enjoying a renaissance.

In the late 1990s, when for most Internet users, bandwidth was still at 56 kbit/s, many Flash animation artists employed limited animation or cutout animation when creating projects intended for web distribution. This allowed artists to release shorts and interactive experiences well under 1mb, which could stream both audio and high-end animation. One example is the first episode of The Goddamn George Liquor Program released in 1999, rendered at only 628kb.

Some hallmarks of poorly produced Flash animation are jerky natural movements (seen in walk-cycles and gestures), auto-tweened character movements, lip-sync without interpolation, and abrupt changes from front to profile view. Although Flash is able to integrate bitmaps and other raster-based art, as well as video, most Flash films are created using only vector-based drawings which often result in a somewhat clean graphic appearance.

Flash animations are typically distributed by way of the World Wide Web, in which case they are often referred to as Internet cartoons, online cartoons, or webtoons. Web Flash animations may be interactive and are often created in a series. A Flash animation is distinguished from a Web comic, which is a comic strip distributed via the Web, rather than an animated cartoon.

Today, Flash animations are being more and more widely used in the multi-user community with flash generators and embedded videos in user’s profiles across the Internet. Many popular remakes are appearing over and over again with the growing success in a less pioneered subject. You tubes are popping up over the Internet with google video and myspace video, and flash generators are too numerous to count. Many of the flash generators are now used for webmasters in menu creators but the dynamic lip-syncing flash characters and font to image manipulators are still the most dominant.

One open challenge in computer animation is a photorealistic animation of humans. Currently, most computer-animated movies show animal characters like Finding Nemo, fantasy characters like Shrek, Monsters Inc, anthropomorphic machines like Cars, Robots or cartoon-like humans such as ‘The Incredibles’ etc. The movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is often cited as the first computer-generated movie to attempt to show realistic-looking humans. However, due to the enormous complexity of the human body, human motion, and human biomechanics, realistic simulation of humans remains largely an open problem. It is one of the “holy grails” of computer animation. Eventually, the goal is to create software where the animator can generate a movie sequence showing a photorealistic human character, undergoing physically-plausible motion, together with clothes, photorealistic hair, a complicated natural background, and possibly interacting with other simulated human characters. This could be done in a way that the viewer is no longer able to tell if a particular movie sequence is computer-generated, or created using real actors in front of movie cameras. Complete human realism is not likely to happen very soon, however such concepts obviously bear certain philosophical implications for the future of the film industry.

For the moment it looks like three dimensional computer animations can be divided into two main directions;

• Photorealistic
• Non-photorealistic rendering.

Photorealistic computer animation can itself be divided into two subcategories; real photorealism (where performance capture is used in the creation of the virtual human characters) and stylized photorealism. Real photorealism is what Final Fantasy tried to achieve and will in the future most likely have the ability to give us live action fantasy features as The Dark Crystal without having to use advanced puppetry and animatronics, while Antz is an example on stylistic photorealism (in the future stylized photorealism will be able to replace traditional stop motion animation as in Corpse Bride). None of them are as mentioned perfected yet, but the progress continues.

Non-photorealistic rendering: The non-photorealistic/cartoonish direction is more like an extension of traditional animation, an attempt to make the animation look like a three dimensional version of a cartoon, still using and perfecting the main principles of animation articulated by the Nine Old Men, such as squash and stretch.

While a single frame from a photorealistic computer animated feature will look like a photo if done right, a single frame vector from a cartoonish computer animated feature will look like a painting (not to be confused with cel shading, which produces an ever simpler look).

Computer animation can be created with computer and animation software. Some examples of animation software are: Amorphium, Art of Illusion, Poser, Ray Dream Studio, Bryce, Maya, Blender, TrueSpace, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, SoftImage XSI, Alice, and Adobe Flash (2D). There are many more. Prices will vary greatly depending on target market. Some impressive animation can be achieved even with basic programs; however, the rendering can take a lot of time on an ordinary home computer. Because of this, video game animators tend to use low resolution, low polygon count renders, such that the graphics can be rendered in real time on a home computer. Photo realistic animation would be impractical in this context.

Professional animators of movies, television, and video sequences on computer games make photo realistic animation with high detail. This level of quality for movie animation would take tens to hundreds of years to create on a home computer. Many powerful workstation computers are used instead. Graphics workstation computers use two to four processors, and thus are a lot more powerful than a home computer, and are specialized for rendering. A large number of workstations (known as a render farm) are networked together to effectively act as a giant computer. The result is a computer-animated movie that can be completed in about one to five years (this process is not comprised solely of rendering, however). A workstation typically costs $2,000 to $16,000, with the more expensive stations being able to render much faster, due to the more technologically advanced hardware that they contain. Pixar’s Renderman is rendering software that is widely used as the movie animation industry standard, in competition with Mental Ray. It can be bought at the official Pixar website for about $5,000 to $8,000. It will work on Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows based graphics workstations along with an animation program such as Maya and Softimage XSI. Professionals also use digital movie cameras, motion capture or performance capture, bluescreens, film editing software, props, and other tools for movie animation.