Contents

1 History
2 Early Examples
3 3D animation
Cel-shaded animation
Morph target animation
Skeletal animation
Motion capture

Other animation techniques

 Animation

History
There is no single person who can be considered the "creator" of the art of
film animation, as there were several people doing several projects which
could be considered various types of animation all around the same time.

Georges Méliès was a creator of special-effect films; he was generally one

of the first people to use animation with his technique. He discovered a
technique by accident which was to stop the camera rolling to change
something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film. This idea was
later known as stop-motion animation. Méliès discovered this technique
accidentally when his camera broke down while shooting a bus driving by.
When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be passing by just as
Méliès restarted rolling the film, his end result was that he had managed to
make a bus transform into a hearse. This was just one of the great
contributors to animation in the early years.

J. Stuart Blackton was possibly the first American filmmaker to use the
techniques of stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. Introduced to
filmmaking by Edison, he pioneered these concepts at the turn of the 20th
century, with his first copyrighted work dated 1900. Several of his films,
among them The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humorous Phases of
Funny Faces (1906) were film versions of Blackton's "lightning artist"
routine, and utilized modified versions of Méliès' early stop-motion
techniques to make a series of blackboard drawings appear to move and
reshape themselves. 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces' is regularly cited as
the first true animated film, and Blackton is considered the first true
animator.
Early Examples

The bouncing ball animation (below) consists of these 6 frames.

This animation moves at 10 frames per second.

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D

artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is
an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision,
and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways. The most
common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video
program, although several other forms of presenting animation also exist.

Animation can sometimes refer to a way of activating a community, i.e.

'animating' the users. This means actions which encourages users to interact
with a given service and is connected to moderation.
 3D animation
Digital models manipulated by an animator. In order to manipulate a
mesh, it is given a digital armature (sculpture). This process is called
rigging. Various other techniques can be applied, such as
mathematical functions (ex. gravity, particle simulations), simulated
fur or hair, effects such as fire and water and the use of Motion
capture to name but a few. Many 3D animations are very believable
and are commonly used as special effects for recent movies.
Examples: The Incredibles, Shrek, Finding Nemo, Flatland
3D animation terms
 Cel-shaded animation
 Morph target animation
 Skeletal animation
 Motion capture

Cel-shaded animation

Object with a basic cel-shader (also known as a toon shader) and border detection.

Cel-shaded animation (also called cel-shading or toon shading) is a type of non-

photorealistic rendering designed to make computer graphics appear to be hand-
drawn. Cel-shading is often used to mimic the style of a comic book or cartoon. It is
a somewhat recent addition to computer graphics, most commonly turning up in
console video games. Though the end result of cel-shading has a very simplistic feel
like that of hand-drawn animation, the process is complex. The name comes from
the clear sheets of acetate, called cels, that are painted on for use in traditional 2D
animation, such as Disney classics.
 Process
The cel-shading process starts with a typical 3D model. Where cel-shading differs
from conventional rendering is in its use of non-photorealistic lighting.
Conventional (smooth) lighting values are calculated for each pixel and then
mapped to a small number of discrete shades to create the characteristic flat look.

Black "ink" outlines and contour lines can be created using a variety of methods.
One popular method is to first render a black silhouette, slightly larger than the
object itself. Backface culling is inverted and the back-facing triangles are drawn in
black. To dilate the silhouette, these back-faces may be drawn in wireframe multiple
times with slight changes in translation. Alternately, back-faces may be rendered
solid-filled, with their vertices translated along their vertex normals in a vertex
shader. After drawing the silhouette, back-face culling is set back to normal to draw
the shading and optional textures of the object. Finally, the image is composited via
Z-buffering, as the back-faces always lie deeper in the scene than the front-faces.
The result is that the object is drawn with a black outline and interior contour lines.

The Utah teapot rendered using cel-shading:

1. The back faces are drawn with thick lines

2. The object is drawn with a basic texture
3. Shading

Steps 2 and 3 can be combined using multi-texturing (see texture mapping).

Another outlining technique is to use 2D image-processing. First, the scene is

rendered (with cel-shading) to a screen-sized color texture:
Then, the scene's depth and world-space surface normal information are rendered
to screen-sized textures:

A Sobel filter or similar edge-detection filter is applied to the normal/depth textures

to generate an edge texture. Texels on detected edges are black, while all other texels
are white:

Finally, the edge texture and the color texture are composited to produce the final
rendered image:

As with most image-processing techniques, the performance penalty for this method
is not affected by scene complexity.

List of cel-shaded media

Video games

Some of the more prominent games that have featured cel-shaded graphics:
  Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
 Cel Damage
 Crackdown
 Crazyracing Kartrider
 Dark Cloud 2
 Fear Effect
 Gungrave series
 Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland
 Jackie Chan Adventures
 Killer7
 Klonoa 2
 The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
 Mega Man X Command Mission
 Metal Gear Acid 2
 Samurai Legend
 Star Wars: Clone Wars
 Steamboy
 Silver Surfer
 Skyland
 Sonic X
 Team Galaxy
 The Iron Giant

Morph target animation

Morph target animation (or per-vertex animation) is a method of 3D computer

animation that is sometimes used as an alternative to skeletal animation. Morph
target animation is stored as a series of vertex positions. In each keyframe of the
animation, the vertices are moved to a different position.

Depending on the renderer, the vertices will move along paths to fill in the blank
time between the keyframes or the renderer will simply switch between the different
positions, creating a somewhat jerky look. The former is used more commonly.

There are advantages to using morph target animation over skeletal animation. The
artist has more control over the movements because he or she can define the
individual positions of the vertices within a keyframe, rather than being constrained
by skeletons. This can be useful for animating cloth, skin, and facial expressions
because it can be difficult to conform those things to the bones that are required for
skeletal animation.

However, there are also disadvantages. Vertex animation is usually a lot more time-
consuming than skeletal animation because every vertex position would have to be
calculated. (3D models in modern computer and video games often contain
something to the order of 4,000-9,000 vertices.) Also, in methods of rendering where
vertices move from position to position during in-between frames, a distortion is
created that doesn't happen when using skeletal animation. This is described by
critics of the technique as looking "shaky". On the other hand, this distortion may
be part of the desired "look".

Not all morph target animation has to be done by actually editing vertex positions.
It is also possible to take vertex positions found in skeletal animation and then use
those rendered as morph target animation.

Sometimes, animation composed in one 3D application suite needs to be transferred

to another, as for rendering. To avoid export issues, native animation formats will
often be converted to morph target animation. This is sometimes necessary due to
the different ways 3D application suites implement bones and other special effects.

Skeletal animation

Skeletal animation, sometimes referred to as rigging, is a technique in computer

animation, particularly in the animation of vertebrates, in which a character is
represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character
(called the skin) and a hierarchical set of bones used for animation only (called the
skeleton).

This technique is used by constructing a series of 'bones'. Each bone has a three
dimensional transformation (which includes its position, scale and orientation), and
an optional parent bone. The bones therefore form a hierarchy. The full transform
of a child node is the product of its parent transform and its own transform. So
moving a thigh-bone will move the lower leg too. As the character is animated, the
bones change their transformation over time, under the influence of some animation
controller.
Each bone in the skeleton is associated with some portion of the character's visual
representation. In the most common case of a polygonal mesh character, the bone is
associated with a group of vertices; for example, in a model of a human being, the
'thigh' bone would be associated with the vertices making up the polygons in the
model's thigh. Portions of the character's skin can normally be associated with
multiple bones, each one having a scaling factors called vertex weights, or blend
weights. The movement of skin near the joints of two bones, can therefore be
influenced by both bones.

For a polygonal mesh, each vertex can have a blend weight for each bone. To
calculate the final position of the vertex, each bone transformation is applied to the
vertex position, scaled by its corresponding weight. This algorithm is called matrix
palette skinning, because the set of bone transformations (stored as transform
matrices) form a palette for the skin vertex to choose from.

Motion capture
Motion capture, motion tracking, or mocap is a technique of digitally recording
movements for entertainment, sports, and medical applications. In the context of
filmmaking (where it is sometimes called performance capture), it refers to the
technique of recording the actions of human actors, and using that information to
animate digital character models in 3D animation.

A dancer wearing a suit used in an optical motion capture system

The procedure
In the motion capture session, the movements of one or more actors are sampled
many times per second. High resolution optical motion capture systems can be used
to sample body, facial and finger movement at the same time.

A motion capture session records only the movements of the actor, not his/her visual
appearance. These movements are recorded as animation data which are mapped to
a 3D model (human, giant robot, etc.) created by a computer artist, to move the
model the same way. This is comparable to the older technique of rotoscope where
the visual appearance of the motion of an actor was filmed, then the film used as a
guide for the frame by frame motion of a hand-drawn animated character.

If desired, a camera can pan, tilt, or dolly around the stage while the actor is
performing and the motion capture system can capture the camera and props as
well. This allows the computer generated characters, images and sets, to have the
same perspective as the video images from the camera. A computer processes the
data and displays the movements of the actor, as inferred from the 3D position of
each marker. If desired, a virtual or real camera can be tracked as well, providing
the desired camera positions in terms of objects in the set.

A related technique match moving can derive 3D camera movement from a single
2D image sequence without the use of photogrammetry, but is often ambiguous
below centimeter resolution, due to the inability to distinguish pose and scale
characteristics from a single vantage point. One might extrapolate that future
technology might include full-frame imaging from many camera angles to record
the exact position of every part of the actor’s body, clothing, and hair for the entire
duration of the session, resulting in a higher resolution of detail than is possible
today.

After processing, the software exports animation data, which computer animators
can associate with a 3D model and then manipulate using normal computer
animation software. If the actor’s performance was good and the software
processing was accurate, this manipulation is limited to placing the actor in the
scene that the animator has created and controlling the 3D model’s interaction with
objects.

Other animation techniques

 Drawn on film animation: a technique where footage is produced by
creating the images directly on film stock, for example by Norman
McLaren and Len Lye.
  Paint-on-glass animation: a technique for making animated films by
manipulating slow drying oil paints on sheets of glass.
 Pinscreen animation: makes use of a screen filled with movable pins,
which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen.
The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast shadows. The
technique has been used to create animated films with a range of
textural effects difficult to achieve with traditional cel animation.
 Sand animation: sand is moved around on a backlighted or
frontlighted piece of glass to create each frame for an animated film.
This creates an interesting effect when animated because of the light
contrast.

Name:- Punyarup Nayak

Roll no:- 710551

Branch:- computer sc.(3rd sem)

The end