Animator

Stop-motion animation is used to describe animation created by physically manipulating real-world objects and photographing them one frame of film at a time to create the illusion of movement. There are many different types of stop-motion animation, usually named after the medium used to create the animation. Computer software is widely available to create this type of animation; however, traditional stop motion animation is usually less expensive and time-consuming to produce than current computer animation.

To animate means "to give life to" and there are two basic ways that animators commonly do this.

Computer-assisted animation is usually classed as two-dimensional (2D) animation. Creators drawings either hand drawn (pencil to paper) or interactively drawn(drawn on the computer) using different assisting appliances and are positioned into specific software packages. Within the software package the creator will place drawings into different key frames which fundamentally create an outline of the most important movements. The computer will then fill in all the " in-between frames" commonly known as Tweening. Computer assisted animation is basically using new technologies to cut down the time scale that traditional animation could take, but still having the elements of traditional drawings of characters or objects.^[7]

Two examples of films using computer-assisted animation are Beauty and the Beast and Antz.

Computer-generated animation is known as 3-dimensional (3D) animation. Creators will design an object or character with an X,Y and Z axis. Unlike the traditional way of animation no pencil to paper drawings create the way computer generated animation works. The object or character created will then be taken into a software, key framing and tweening are also carried out in computer generated animation but are also a lot of techniques used that do not relate to traditional animation. Animators can break physical laws by using mathematical algorithms to cheat, mass, force and gravity rulings. Fundamentally, time scale and quality could be said to be a preferred way to produce animation as they are two major things that are enhanced by using computer generated animation. Another great aspect of CGA is the fact you can create a flock of creatures to act independently when created as a group. An animal's fur can be programmed to wave in the wind and lie flat when it rains instead of programming each strand of hair separately.^[7]

Three examples of computer-generated animation movies are Toy Story, The Incredibles and Shrek.

Realism in computer animation can mean making each frame look photorealistic, in the sense that the scene is rendered to resemble a photograph, or to making the animation of characters believable and lifelike. Computer animation can also be realistic with or without the photorealistic rendering.

One of the greatest challenges in computer animation has been creating human characters that look and move with the highest degree of realism. Many animated films instead feature characters who are anthropomorphic animals (Finding Nemo, Ice Age, Bolt, Madagascar, Over the Hedge, Rio, Kung Fu Panda, Alpha and Omega), machines (Cars,WALL-E, Robots), insects (Antz, A Bug's Life, The Ant Bully, Bee Movie), fantasy creatures and characters (Monsters, Inc., Shrek, TMNT, Brave, Epic), or humans with nonrealistic cartoon-like proportions (The Incredibles, Despicable Me, Up, Megamind, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Planet 51, Hotel Transylvania, Team Fortress 2).

Part of the difficulty in making pleasing, realistic human characters is the uncanny valley, the concept where (up to a point) the human audience tends to have an increasingly negative emotional response as a human replica looks and acts more and more human. Also, some materials that commonly appear in a scene such as cloth, foliage, fluids, and hair have proven more difficult to faithfully recreate and animate than others. Consequently, special software and techniques have been developed to better simulate these specific elements.

In theory, realistic computer animation can reach a point where it is indistinguishable from real action captured on film. When computer animation achieves this level of realism, it may have major repercussions for the film industry.^{[citation needed]}

The goal of computer animation is not always to emulate live action as closely as possible. Computer animation can also be tailored to mimic or substitute for other types of animation, such as traditional stop-motion animation (as shown in Flushed Away or The Lego Movie). Some of the long-standing basic principles of animation, like squash & stretch, call for movement that is not strictly realistic, and such principles still see widespread application in computer animation.

The realistic modeling of human facial features is both one of the most challenging and sought after elements in computer-generated imagery.Computer facial animation is a highly complex field where models typically include a very large number of animation variables. Historically speaking, the first SIGGRAPH tutorials on State of the art in Facial Animation in 1989 and 1990 proved to be a turning point in the field by bringing together and consolidating multiple research elements and sparked interest among a number of researchers.^[3]

The Facial Action Coding System (with 46 action units, such as "lip bite" or "squint"), which had been developed in 1976, became a popular basis for many systems.^[4] As early as 2001, MPEG-4 included 68 Face Animation Parameters (FAPs) for lips, jaws, etc., and the field has made significant progress since then and the use of facial microexpressionhas increased.^[4][5]

In some cases, an affective space, such as the PAD emotional state model, can be used to assign specific emotions to the faces of avatars. In this approach, the PAD model is used as a high level emotional space and the lower level space is the MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters (FAP). A mid-level Partial Expression Parameters (PEP) space is then used to in a two level structure — the PAD-PEP mapping and the PEP-FAP translation model.^[6]

Computer animation can be created with a computer and an animation software. 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 and low polygon count renders so that the graphics can be rendered in real time on a home computer. Photorealistic animation would be impractical in this context.

Professional animators of movies, television, and video sequences on computer games make photorealistic animation with high detail. This level of quality for movie animation would take hundreds of years to create on a home computer. Instead, many powerful workstation computers are used. Graphics workstation computers use two-four processors, and they are a lot more powerful than an actual home computer and they 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 (however, this process is not composed solely of rendering). A workstation typically costs $2,000-16,000 with the more expensive stations being able to render much faster due to the more technologically advanced hardware that they contain. Professionals also use digital movie cameras, motion or performance capture,bluescreens, film editing software, props, and other tools used for movie animation.