Computer animation
In the 1960s, Bell Telephone Laboratories became a quiet hub for digital movement. Edward E. Zajac and Frank W. Sinden worked there to create early computer animation experiments. Kenneth C. Knowlton and A. Michael Noll joined them in these pioneering efforts. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory also practiced digital animation during this same decade. Charles Csuri and James Shaffer created an animation named Hummingbird in 1967. Nikolai Konstantinov used a BESM-4 machine to produce Kitty in 1968, showing a cat moving around. These early works laid the foundation for all future digital motion.
To trick the visual system into seeing smooth movement, pictures must be drawn at around 12 frames per second or faster. Most people can detect jerkiness if rates fall below 12 frames per second. Conventional hand-drawn cartoon animation often uses 15 frames per second to save on drawings needed. Films seen in theaters in the United States run at 24 frames per second. This rate is sufficient to create the appearance of continuous movement. Computer animation software interpolates between keyframes by generating a spline between keys plotted on a graph. These splines follow Bézier curves to control how the curve relates to the keyframes. Using interpolation allows animators to dynamically change animations without redoing all in-between work.
Computer-generated animation serves as an umbrella term for three-dimensional animation and two-dimensional computer animation. Subcategories include asset driven, hybrid, and digital drawn animation. Creators animate using code or software instead of pencil-to-paper drawings. For 3D models, objects are built on the computer monitor and figures are rigged with a virtual skeleton. The limbs, eyes, mouth, and clothes move by the animator on key frames. Normally, differences between key frames are drawn in a process known as tweening. In 3D computer animation, this happens automatically through interpolation. Before becoming a final product, 3D animations exist only as moving shapes within software. They must be rendered before they can be composited into a final product.
Films like Avatar released in 2009 use CGI for the majority of movie runtime while incorporating human actors. The Lion King remake from 2016 achieved photorealism to the point that it was marketed as live-action. WETA workshops meticulously designed digital muscles in the faces of characters for Avatar: Way of Water. Their emotional range became comparable to that of a real human. VFX artists working on Interstellar published a paper about the science used to create the Gargantua black hole. Toho studios won an Oscar for groundbreaking visual effects on Godzilla Minus One despite a small budget relative to most box-office movies. These achievements demonstrate how modern rendering engines achieve lifelike textures and physics simulations.
Professional animators use powerful workstation computers because ordinary home computers take hundreds of years to render high detail. Silicon Graphics said in 1989 that industry needs typically caused graphical innovations in workstations. Many workstations known as render farms are networked together to act as a giant computer. A computer-animated movie can be completed in about one to five years using this infrastructure. A typical workstation costs between $2,000 and $16,000 with more expensive stations rendering much faster. Rhythm and Hues Studios labored for two years to create Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia. That character had about 1,851 controllers with 742 in the face alone. Programs like Blender allow people who cannot afford expensive software to work similarly to professionals.
A possible outcome when attempting to make pleasing realistic human characters is the uncanny valley concept. Human audiences tend to have increasingly negative emotional responses as a human replica looks and acts more human. Films such as The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol were criticized as disconcerting or creepy. The Facial Action Coding System developed in 1976 included 46 action units like lip bite or squint. This system became a popular basis for many facial animation systems. As early as 2001, MPEG-4 included 68 Face Animation Parameters for lips and jaws. Despite these technical advances, some films still struggle to achieve perfect believability without triggering audience discomfort.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
Who created early computer animation experiments at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1960s?
Edward E. Zajac and Frank W. Sinden worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories to create early computer animation experiments during the 1960s.
What frame rate is required for smooth movement in computer animation?
Pictures must be drawn at around 12 frames per second or faster to trick the visual system into seeing smooth movement.
When was the animation named Hummingbird created by Charles Csuri and James Shaffer?
Charles Csuri and James Shaffer created an animation named Hummingbird in 1967.
How long does it take to complete a typical computer-animated movie using render farms?
A computer-animated movie can be completed in about one to five years using networked workstation infrastructure known as render farms.
Why do audiences sometimes find realistic human characters disconcerting in films like The Polar Express?
Human audiences tend to have increasingly negative emotional responses as a human replica looks and acts more human due to the uncanny valley concept.