Animation Techniques

Animation is the process of making the illusion of motion and change by means of
the rapid display of a sequence of static images that minimally differ from each
other. Animators have invented and used a variety of different animation
techniques. Basically there are six animation techniques:

1. Traditional Animation

Traditional animation (or classical animation, cel animation, and hand-drawn

animation) is an animation technique in which each frame is drawn by hand. The
technique was the dominant form of animation in cinema until the advent
of computer animation. Traditionally most of the animation was done by hand. All
the frames in an animation had to be drawn by hand. Since each second of
animation requires 24 frames film, the amount of efforts required to create even
the shortest of movies can be tremendous.

 Process

Animation productions begin by deciding on a story. The oral or literary source

material must then be converted into an animation film script, from which
the storyboard is derived. The storyboard has an appearance somewhat similar to
a comic book, and it shows the sequence of shots as consecutive sketches that
also indicate transitions, camera angles, and framing. The images allow the
animation team to plan the flow of the plot and the composition of the imagery.
The storyboard artists will have regular meetings with the director and may have
to redraw or "re-board" a sequence many times before it meets final approval.

 Voice recording
Before true animation begins, a preliminary soundtrack or scratch track is
recorded, so that the animation may be more precisely synchronized to the
soundtrack. A completed cartoon soundtrack will feature music, sound effects,
and dialogue performed by voice actors. However, the scratch track used during
animation typically contains only the voices, any vocal songs to which characters
must sing-along, and temporary musical score tracks; the final score and sound
effects are added during post-production.

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2. Key-framing
In this technique, a storyboard is laid out and then the artists draw the major
frames of the animation. Major frames are the ones in which prominent changes
take place. They are the key points of animation. Key-framing requires that the
animator specifies critical or key positions for the objects. The computer then
automatically fills in the missing frames by smoothly interpolating between those
positions. Key-frames are important frames during which an object changes its
size, direction, shape or other properties. The computer then figures out all the
in-between frames and saves an extreme amount of time for the animator. The
following illustrations depict the frames drawn by user and the frames generated
by computer.

3. Procedural
A procedural animation is a type of computer animation, used to automatically
generate animation in real-time to allow for a more diverse series of actions than
could otherwise be created using predefined animations. In a procedural
animation, the objects are animated by a procedure − a set of rules − not by Key-
framing. The animator specifies rules and initial conditions and runs simulation.
Rules are often based on physical rules of the real world expressed by
mathematical equations. Procedural animation is used to simulate particle
systems (smoke, fire, water), cloth and clothing, rigid body dynamics, and hair
and fur dynamics, as well as character animation.

It provides very realistic effects that can be generated that would very hardly be
possible with traditional animation

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4. Behavioural
In behavioural animation, an autonomous character determines its own actions,
at least to a certain extent. This gives the character some ability to improvise,
and frees the animator from the need to specify each detail of every character's
motion. In this type of animation, an autonomous character determines its own
actions, at least to a certain extent. This gives the character some ability to
improvise, and frees the animator from the need to specify each detail of every
character's motion. An early example of behavioural animation was the
1987 boids model of bird flocking. While in some limited sense autonomous
characters have a mind, their simplistic behavioural controllers are more closely
related to the field of artificial life rather than artificial intelligence.

5. Motion Capture
Another technique is Motion Capture, in which magnetic or vision-based sensors
record the actions of a human or animal object in three dimensions. A computer
then uses these data to animate the object. This technology has enabled a number
of famous athletes to supply the actions for characters in sports video games.
Motion capture is pretty popular with the animators mainly because some of the
commonplace human actions can be captured with relative ease. However, there
can be serious discrepancies between the shapes or dimensions of the subject
and the graphical character and this may lead to problems of exact execution.

It is used in military, entertainment, sports, medical applications, and for

validation of computer vision and robotics. When it includes face and fingers or
captures subtle expressions, it is often referred to as performance capture. In
many fields, motion capture is sometimes called motion tracking, but in
filmmaking and games, motion tracking usually refers more to match moving.

In motion capture sessions, movements of one or more actors are sampled many
times per second. Whereas early techniques used images from multiple cameras
to calculate 3D positions, often the purpose of motion capture is to record only
the movements of the actor, not his or her visual appearance. This animation
data is mapped to a 3D model so that the model performs the same actions as
the actor.

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  Actor

An actor is filmed performing an action, and then the recorded film is projected
onto an animation table frame-by-frame. Animators trace the live-action footage
onto animation cells, capturing the actor's outline and motions frame-by-frame,
and then they fill in the traced outlines with the animated character. The
completed animation cells are then photographed frame-by-frame, exactly
matching the movements and actions of the live-action footage. The end result of
which is that the animated character replicates exactly the live-action movements
of the actor. However, this process takes a considerable amount of time and effort.

6. Physics Based / Dynamics:

Physically-Based Animation (PBA) refers to an area of computer graphics in which
the aim is to generate physically-plausible animations using Artificial Intelligence.
The animations are usually played using a virtual character in a 2D or 3D simulated
environment One of the main differences between PBA and traditional key-frame
animation is that PBAs can dynamically adjust to the changes in the environment.
On the other hand, key-frame animation is static and non-responsive in nature and
must be handled carefully, otherwise it can easily produce unnatural movements.
Unlike key framing and motion picture, simulation uses the laws of physics to
generate motion of pictures and other objects. Simulations can be easily used to
produce slightly different sequences while maintaining physical realism. In
contrast the applications based on key-framing and motion select and modify
motions form a pre-computed library of motions. One drawback that simulation
suffers from is the expertise and time required to handcraft the appropriate
controls systems.