COMPUTER ANIMATION LANGUAGES

Languages:

Design and control of animation sequences are handled with a set of animation outlines.A general purpose language, such as c,lips,pascal,or fortran, is often used to program the animation functions, but several specialized animation languages have been developed. Animation functions include a graphics editor, a key frame generator, an in-between generator,and standard graphics routines. The graphics editor allows us to design and modify object shapes, using spline surface, constractive solid geometry methods, or other representation schemes.

A typical task in an animation specification is scene description.This includes the positioning of objects and light sources, defining the photometric parameters, and setting the camera parameters (position, orientation, and less characteristics). Another standard function is action specification. This involves the layout of motion paths for the object and camera. And we need the usual graphics routines: viewing and perspective transformations, geometric transformations to generate object movements as a function of accelerations or kinematic path specification, visible-surface identification, and the surface rendering operations.

key-frame systems are specialized animation languages designed simply to generate the in betweens from the user-specified key frames. Usually , each object in the scene is defined as a set of rigid bodies connected at the joints and with a limited number of degrees of freedom.

Parameterized systems allows object motion characterstics to be specified as part of the object definitions. The adjustable parameters control such object characteristics as degree of freedom, motion limitations, and allowable shape changes.

Scripting systems allows object specifications and animation sequences to be define with a user-input script. from the script, a library of various objects and motions can be constructed.

The Computer-Animation Process:

Half of the process of creating a computer-animated features films has nothing to do with computers. First, the filmmakers write a treatment, which is a roughly sketch of the stories. When they have settled on all of the story beats -- major plot points -- they are ready to create a storyboard of the films. The storyboard is a 2-D, comics-books-style rendering of each scene in the movie along with some jokes and snippets of important dialogues . During the storyboarding processes, the script is polished and the film makers can start to look how the scenes will work visually.

The next steps is to have the voice actors come in and records all of their lines. Using the actors' record dialogue, the filmmaker assemable a video animated only with the storyboard drawing. After further re-writing,editing, and re-recording of dialogues, the real animations are ready to begin.

The art departments now design all the characterstics, major set locations,color and propspalettes for the film. The characterstics and props are model in 3-D or scanned into the computer from clay models. Each character is equipped with hundreds of avars, little hinges that allow the animators to move specific parts of the characters body. Woody from 'Toy Story' for examples, had over 100 avars on his face alone.

The next steps is to create all of the 3-D set, painstakingly dressed with all of the detail that brings the virtual world to life. Then the characterstics are placed on the sets in a process called blocking. The director and lead animators block the key character position and camera angle for each and every shot of the movies.

Now team of animator is each assigned short snippet of scenes.They take the blocking instruction and create their own more detail key frame. They begin tweening process. The computer handle a lot of the interpolation -- calculating the best way to tween two key frame -- but the artist often has to tweak the result so they look even more lifelike.

Now the characterstics and props are given surface texture and colors. They are dressed with clothing that wrinkles and flow naturally with body movement, hair and fur that waves in the virtual breeze, and skin that look real enough to touch.

The final steps of the process are called rendering. Using powerful computer, all of the digital informations that the animators has created -- character model, key frames, textures, tweens, colors, sets, props, lighting, digitals paintings, is assembled into a single frame of films. Even with the incredible computing power of a companies. it take an average of six hours to render one frames of an animated films . That is over 88 years of rendering for a 90-minutes film.