Animation

Creating animation is a labor-intensive and lengthy process. The hand-drawn animation of the Warner Brothers and Disney studios dominated the field of animation for decades - and just recently have been dethroned by a few new-comers using a digital workflow - Pixar and Dreamworks SGK.

The software developed for animation has become quite sophisticated. Some of the tools used for animation are:

1. 3DStudio Max: Completely object-oriented, features volumetric lighting, and spacewarps.
2. LightWave3D: High quality PC 3D computer graphics software application.
3. Adobe Photoshop: Used to touch up digitized images or to create graphics.
4. Adobe Premiere: Used to composite digitized video, stills, and apply a variety of transitions and special effects.
5. AliasIWavefront: Developed for the SGI platform. Capable of modeling some of the most complicated objects.
6. Animator Studio: Cell animation program from AutoDesk.
7. Elastic Reality: High quality morphing program.
8. SoftImage: One of the top three top animation applications used in major studios around the world.

Creating quality animation takes the skills and knowledge of a wide variety of people - from animators and artists, to software engineers. Many of the software applications used in professional animation studios are created by in-house programmers. These complex animation tools enable the animators to capture the realism and effects required in animated films. •