Animation in Computer graphics

Animation is giving life to digital models. It means changing something over time whether a model's position or just a color value in a rendering style. There are two techniques usually employed in computer graphics.
1. Procedural animation
2. Keyframe animation

Procedural animation is generating motion through mathematical or rules based languages. Twister, Star wars, Armageddon are some movies that used complex rules to degine the movement of particles in animation. These rules can be based on accurate physical principles or they can be faked to skew towards a particular desired effect. After these rules are started, simulation runs its course creating its own effects designed by the artists. This technique sometimes results in different outcome than what was expected. This requires changing the rules and running the simulation again. This is time consuming, but executed properly, procedural animation can bring some complex animation to life which cannot be achieved by any other means.

In traditional keyframe animation, specific values are set for a given attribute that has to moved and the computer generates interpolating curves that join successive keyframes. At any point along the curve between these keys, the computer evaluates the curve to resolve to a value. Most often, the whole number frames are used to generate the beauty pass of the image. The intermediate frames are used to create the motion blur.

These two methods fundamentally differ from other animation techniques such as stop-motion or cel animation which requires the animators to draw every single successive frame one at a time from start to end.

That is my ramblings for today. More later...