Whether you're using software or animating free-hand, there are some basic concepts that apply. Maya is even used at major effects outfits like Weta Digital, the company that created the CGI for Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" films. Newer versions of all three are still in use as of 2015. Maya was released in 1998 by Alias/Wavefront and is now owned by Autodesk. Alias's 1993 software PowerAnimator, used on the breakthrough CG film "Jurassic Park," among others, was eventually combined with two other software applications (Advanced Visualizer and Explore) to become Maya. LightWave 3-D was later ported to Mac and Windows. In 1990, NewTek released Video Toaster, which included LightWave 3-D, for Commodore's Amiga computer. Autodesk 3-D Studio DOS came out in 1990 and later became 3-D Studio Max, a 3-D animation software full of features that was released in 1996. In the 1990s, more animation packages began to hit the market. Autodesk even released an animation program called AutoFlix in 1986. Adobe Photoshop was developed in 1988, and version 1.0 was officially released in early 1990. Several programs that let users create computer graphics were released in the 1980s, including Autodesk's AutoCAD in 1983, MacPaint in 1984 and Adobe Illustrator in 1987. Computer animation is now routine in television, movies and advertisement, and it's entirely possible to create in your own home. The advent of small, affordable personal computers was another major step that made this possible. Pixar's "Toy Story" (1995) was the first completely CGI full-length film.īoth ILM and Pixar, along with other emerging computer graphics houses, would develop lots of technical innovations for use in computer animation, some of which eventually filtered into commercially available software. It was while Catmull was there in 1986 that Steve Jobs purchased Lucasfilm's Computer Graphics Division and it became Pixar. It wasn't long before some of the top computer graphics talent started working in the film industry for outfits like George Lucas's movie special effects powerhouse, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), originally created to do special effects work for "Star Wars." Jim Blinn and Ed Catmull both worked for Lucasfilm, though at different times. First, he made realistic computer animations of the Voyager missions that aired on news programs starting in 1979, and then he and his team at the JPL contracted to do graphical renderings for Carl Sagan's 1980 PBS series "Cosmos." (Blinn would later develop "Blinn shading" and an enhancement to texture mapping called "bump mapping.") The computer-generated imagery (CGI) characters and objects we increasingly see in live-action movies are created by animators using software, too.Ī one-time student of Ivan Sutherland named Jim Blinn did some of the earliest television CG work while working for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Whether fanciful or realistic, animations routinely appear in a number of other places, including advertisements, websites, educational videos and video games, to name but a few. Some people still create traditional hand-drawn animation, but most of the cartoons we see today are created using computer software. This created longer, more detailed cartoons than people had seen before, but it required creating a large number of images (usually around 24 per second of film). In the early 20th century, greats like Max Fleischer and Walt Disney created individual images on paper, animation cels or some other physical medium, photographed each one and then had a movie reel of the photographs developed. Early devices like the zoetrope (a cylinder with images inside that appeared to be moving when spun) were created to view what amounted to very short cartoons, but the invention of photography, and then projectors, took animation to a whole new level. Viewing them in quick succession creates the illusion of motion. Making an animation requires producing a series of images that change gradually over the course of many frames. Cartoons are fun and entertaining to behold, but they're also a lot of work to create.
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