Computer Animation

The term Animation is derived from 'animate' that literally means 'to give life to', 'Animating' a thing implies to impart movement to something that can't move on its own. So as to animate something, the animator must be capable to give, either directly or indirectly as how the 'thing' is to shift by time and space. We have previously discussed different transformations; you can impart motion, size rotation and alteration and so on, to a specified graphic object. Before dealing along with complexities of animation, we have to a look at several basic ideas of Animation in further sections. In these sections we will discuss various kinds of animations.

In our childhood, we all have notice the flip book of cricketers that came free with several soft drink, where several pictures of similar person in different bowling or batting actions are intact consecutively on separate pages, as we flip the pages of the book the picture shows to be in motion, this was a flipbook where some papers of very similar size along with a particular drawing on each paper hence the viewer could flip through them. It is an easy application of the fundamental principle of Physics termed as Persistence of Vision. This low tech animation was fairly popular in the year 1800s while the Persistence of vision that is 1/16th of a second, was discovered. Such discovery led to several more interesting low tech animation devices as the zoetrope, wheel of life and so on. Later, based on several basic mathematics and physics principles, some researches were conducted that permitted us to generate 2 or 3D animations.