Challenging career in the field of animations

Do you have interest in doing something new or experimenting with computers? then I would suggest you to opt an animations related career because there is a wide arena of opportunities in this field to be pursued as a future career. This is probably because computers are considered to be an integral part of the human existence, especially in the developed and developing countries. It has become imperative for every person to have basic knowledge of this interactive machine.

One of the very challenging areas in the computer field, which involves much more creativity, is computer animation. Animation finds its place in many areas but it is most commonly used in the filming industry, where creativity is used to animate the inanimate objects or characters that are created through drawing. With the use of media such as television and the Internet for advertisement and propaganda, animation will find its use not only in the filming industry but also the visual advertisement industry. The two-dimensional and three-dimensional techniques used in animation are being used to create newer and livelier effects by the film makers and television stations to bring about a change in the way television channels or movies are being watched by the people.

As most of us know that animation finds its place in the filming industry and in television but there are several other areas that animation plays a large part in. The biggest scope for animation comes from the gaming industry. The typical roles for people pursuing animation as a career in computers, depending upon their skill sets, includes digital film animator, visual artists, graphics designer, senior animator, web artist or web designer. The basic requisites for animation as a career, apart from knowing the basics in computer education, involve an extraordinary aptitude and amazing versatility in drawing. An individual who enjoys drawing and computers could easily make a successful career out of computer animation. Those animators who obtain a higher level of education are usually the ones who are offered the better positions as they come available.

The career in animation will be more than rewarding for a person that is full of creativity and it offers a true sense of satisfaction when you see how much others appreciate your work.

Animations as one of the modern forms of entertainment

One contemporary example of suspension of disbelief is the audience's acceptance that Superman hides his identity from the world by simply donning a pair of glasses, conservative clothing, and acting in a "mild-mannered" fashion. Not only is the disguise so thin as to be ridiculous, but also in the TV series, Adventures of Superman, this absurdity was carried to an extreme. Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen constantly suspected Clark Kent of being Superman, yet when obvious evidence was right in their faces — such as times when Clark was missing his glasses — they never saw the resemblance.

Strangely, while some audience members took issue with the flimsiness of Superman's disguise, they didn't take issue with the idea of the existence of a super being whose only weakness was kryptonite. One defending suspension of disbelief might say that flying, along with the rest of Superman's abilities, is a foundational premise regarding the character, which the audience accepted as part of the deal at the beginning.

Another major example of suspended disbelief was The Flintstones cartoon series. The characters have televisions, cars, telephones, and various appliances that would be powered by electricity in modern society, The show was set in "prehistoric" times and there was no mention of electricity. The "prehistoric" characters were even shown to celebrate Christmas and travel into the future.

Gary Larson discussed the question with regard to his comic strip, The Far Side; he noted that readers wrote him to complain that a male mosquito referred to his "job" sucking blood when it is in fact the females that drain blood, but that the same readers accepted that the mosquitoes live in houses, wear clothes, and speak English.

Flash animation

A Flash animation is an animated film, which is created using Adobe Flash animation software and often distributed in the .swf file format. It can be created in Flash or with other programs capable of writing .swf files. The term Flash animation refers to the file format but to a certain kind of movement and visual style, which, in many circles, is seen as simplistic or unpolished. However, with dozens of Flash animated television series, countless more Flash animated television commercials, and award-winning online shorts in circulation, Flash animation is enjoying a renaissance.

In the late 1990s, when for most Internet users, bandwidth was still at 56 kbit/s, many Flash animation artists employed limited animation or cutout animation when creating projects intended for web distribution. This allowed artists to release shorts and interactive experiences well under 1mb, which could stream both audio and high-end animation. One example is the first episode of The Goddamn George Liquor Program released in 1999, rendered at only 628kb.

Some hallmarks of poorly produced Flash animation are jerky natural movements (seen in walk-cycles and gestures), auto-tweened character movements, lip-sync without interpolation, and abrupt changes from front to profile view. Although Flash is able to integrate bitmaps and other raster-based art, as well as video, most Flash films are created using only vector-based drawings which often result in a somewhat clean graphic appearance.
Flash animations are typically distributed by way of the World Wide Web, in which case they are often referred to as Internet cartoons, online cartoons, or webtoons. Web Flash animations may be interactive and are often created in a series. A Flash animation is distinguished from a Web comic, which is a comic strip distributed via the Web, rather than an animated cartoon.

Today, Flash animations are being more and more widely used in the multi-user community with flash generators and embedded videos in user's profiles across the Internet. Many popular remakes are appearing over and over again with the growing success in a less pioneered subject. You tubes are popping up over the Internet with google video and myspace video, and flash generators are too numerous to count. Many of the flash generators are now used for webmasters in menu creators but the dynamic lip-syncing flash characters and font to image manipulators are still the most dominant.

The future computer animations

One open challenge in computer animation is a photorealistic animation of humans. Currently, most computer-animated movies show animal characters like Finding Nemo, fantasy characters like Shrek, Monsters Inc, anthropomorphic machines like Cars, Robots or cartoon-like humans such as ‘The Incredibles’ etc. The movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is often cited as the first computer-generated movie to attempt to show realistic-looking humans. However, due to the enormous complexity of the human body, human motion, and human biomechanics, realistic simulation of humans remains largely an open problem. It is one of the "holy grails" of computer animation. Eventually, the goal is to create software where the animator can generate a movie sequence showing a photorealistic human character, undergoing physically-plausible motion, together with clothes, photorealistic hair, a complicated natural background, and possibly interacting with other simulated human characters. This could be done in a way that the viewer is no longer able to tell if a particular movie sequence is computer-generated, or created using real actors in front of movie cameras. Complete human realism is not likely to happen very soon, however such concepts obviously bear certain philosophical implications for the future of the film industry.
For the moment it looks like three dimensional computer animations can be divided into two main directions;

• Photorealistic
• Non-photorealistic rendering.

Photorealistic computer animation can itself be divided into two subcategories; real photorealism (where performance capture is used in the creation of the virtual human characters) and stylized photorealism. Real photorealism is what Final Fantasy tried to achieve and will in the future most likely have the ability to give us live action fantasy features as The Dark Crystal without having to use advanced puppetry and animatronics, while Antz is an example on stylistic photorealism (in the future stylized photorealism will be able to replace traditional stop motion animation as in Corpse Bride). None of them are as mentioned perfected yet, but the progress continues.
Non-photorealistic rendering: The non-photorealistic/cartoonish direction is more like an extension of traditional animation, an attempt to make the animation look like a three dimensional version of a cartoon, still using and perfecting the main principles of animation articulated by the Nine Old Men, such as squash and stretch.
While a single frame from a photorealistic computer animated feature will look like a photo if done right, a single frame vector from a cartoonish computer animated feature will look like a painting (not to be confused with cel shading, which produces an ever simpler look).

Computer animation software’s

Computer animation can be created with computer and animation software. Some examples of animation software are: Amorphium, Art of Illusion, Poser, Ray Dream Studio, Bryce, Maya, Blender, TrueSpace, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, SoftImage XSI, Alice, and Adobe Flash (2D). There are many more. Prices will vary greatly depending on target market. Some impressive animation can be achieved even with basic programs; however, the rendering can take a lot of time on an ordinary home computer. Because of this, video game animators tend to use low resolution, low polygon count renders, such that the graphics can be rendered in real time on a home computer. Photo realistic animation would be impractical in this context.
Professional animators of movies, television, and video sequences on computer games make photo realistic animation with high detail. This level of quality for movie animation would take tens to hundreds of years to create on a home computer. Many powerful workstation computers are used instead. Graphics workstation computers use two to four processors, and thus are a lot more powerful than a home computer, and are specialized for rendering. A large number of workstations (known as a render farm) are networked together to effectively act as a giant computer. The result is a computer-animated movie that can be completed in about one to five years (this process is not comprised solely of rendering, however). A workstation typically costs $2,000 to $16,000, with the more expensive stations being able to render much faster, due to the more technologically advanced hardware that they contain. Pixar's Renderman is rendering software that is widely used as the movie animation industry standard, in competition with Mental Ray. It can be bought at the official Pixar website for about $5,000 to $8,000. It will work on Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows based graphics workstations along with an animation program such as Maya and Softimage XSI. Professionals also use digital movie cameras, motion capture or performance capture, bluescreens, film editing software, props, and other tools for movie animation.

Kinds of animations

I have heard that there are three different kinds of animation are there animated they are gif’s, plug-ins animation and java script based animation. Let us know them in detail. The number of ways to produce an animation for a web page grows daily. We'll look at a few of these and begin with the simpler ways to make and place animations and progress to the more complex:
Animated gifs: Animated gifs are perhaps the simplest ways to create an animation. Simple freeware tools exist for their creation, and the process of fashioning a satisfactory animation is usually only a matter of choosing several regular gif files and placing them in the proper order in the animated gif program. Then, once the animated gif has been created, it is placed on the web page the same way that a regular gif file is.
JavaScript-based animations: JavaScript (a relatively simple programming script language that works with HTML in both Netscape and Internet Explorer and not to be confused with java) can be used to create effects similar to animated gifs. The advantage to JavaScript-based animations is that they can be more interactive. A common JavaScript-based animation on the web is one that changes a bit of text to a different color when the cursor is placed on it. This is a popular animation for menus. JavaScript-based animations require that certain bits of computer code be placed at specific points in the HTML source page.
Plug-in animations: Animations created by other software programs can be viewed on a web page if the web browser is using a plug-in. A plug-in is a bit of software that adds functionality to the browser. One of the most popular plug-ins, for example, is the Shockwave plug-in. If it is installed on a browser, then a user can view animations created by Macromedia's Director program, a very powerful application to make interactive CD's and other stand-alone applications. Another plug-in is the Real Player plug-in which lets the user view specially encoded video clips right on a web page.
These are different kinds of animations as on my knowledge.

Artistic careers in animation

Character Animators use the computer to bring characters to life. To be a successful candidate, these artists may have backgrounds in any of the following animation disciplines in addition to their computer training:
Effects Artists add the forces of nature to an animated film. An Effects Artist must take direction easily, work well with an artistic team and deliver scenes in a timely fashion. Knowledge of Unix is necessary.
Modelers are responsible for creating complex, organic models needed for character animation, prop elements for effects, and environmental sets. Applicants must have strong expertise in complex 3D modeling package(s)
Painters This could include painting texture maps working with TDs to enhance the look, and creating lighting setups. This artist typically has previous production experience and has demonstrated exceptional skills/abilities in CGI artwork.
Lighting/Composting Artists have an understanding of color, contrast, and lighting design, along with a solid familiarity with 3D lighting in a production environment. Also a strong visual sense and the ability to distinguish subtle differences that affect the matching of elements created in multiple mediums are imperative.
Character Technical Directors are responsible for constructing 3D character rigs and animation interfaces, and establishing muscle, skin and clothing behaviors which range from broad squash & stretch to realistic physical simulations.
Visual Development Artists are hired to visually explore a literary or musical property under consideration for and adaptable to animated films. These artists will experiment with the diverse elements of film presentation to manipulate dramatic-comic story moments, moods, character conflict, place-time motifs and possible stylizations for maximum emotional effect in communicating that story's theme. Qualifications include a rich imagination, a sense of caricature and design, a strong color sense, mastery of human and animal anatomy, ability to work in different media and the versatility to conceptualize visually in a variety of techniques.
These are some of the different field in animation industry and helpful in choosing the best alternative in the field of computer animation.