film and animation graphics :: essays research papers fc

INTRODUCTION   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Hollywood has gone digital, and the old ways of doing things are dying. Animation and special effects created with computers have been embraced by television networks, advertisers, and movie studios alike. Film editors, who for decades worked trying to make scenes look real are now sitting in front of computers screens. They edit entire features while adding sound that is not only stored digitally, but that is also created and manipulated with computers. Viewers are witnessing the results of all this in the form of stories and experiences that they never dreamed of before. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of all this, however, is that the entire digital effects and animation industry is still growing pretty strong and, the future looks bright. In the beginning, computer graphics were really hard to manipulate but with time the software companies started to improve their programs, adding more tools and key features, which helped the way computers generated pictures, simulating real world scenes. 1 Creating computer graphics is essentially about three things: Modeling, Animation, and Rendering. Modeling is the process by which 3- dimensional objects are built inside the computer; animation is about making those objects come to life with movement, and rendering is about giving them their ultimate appearance and looks. Hardware is the brains and brawn of computer graphics, but it is powerless without the right software. It is the software that allows the modeler to build a computer graphic object that helps the animator bring this object to life, and that, in the end, gives the image its final look. Sophisticated computer graphics software for commercial studios is either purchased for $30,000 to $50,000, or developed in-house by computer programmers. Most studios use a combination of both, developing new software to meet new project needs. MODELING   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Modeling is the first step in creating any 3D computer graphics. Modeling in computer graphics is a little like sculpting, a little like building models with wood, plastic and glue, and a lot like CAD. Its flexibility and potential are unmatched in any other art form. With computer graphics it is possible 2 to build entire worlds and entire realities. Each can have its own laws, its own looks, and its own scale of time and space. Access to these 3- dimensional computer realities is almost always through the 2-dimensional window of a computer monitor. This can lead to the misunderstanding that 3-D modeling is merely the production perspective drawings.