Evolution of Making Animations at Home

A lot of people would like to make their own movies. By that I mean to go beyond editing together movie clips taken while on holiday, to making movies which tell a story. In most cases professional actors are expensive and most friends don’t make good actors. This is why making a 3D animation movie is a satisfying low cost alternative.

I remember a holiday movie my father made in the 1950s. It had an animated title filmed, like the rest of the movie on 8mm celluloid film. When I asked him about it, he told me he had put his camera in a clamp pointing at the floor. He then created the first letter of the title using a piece of string and filmed it for a couple of seconds, then he created the second letter and so on. It was several days later, when the film came back from the developing laboratory that he discovered that his desk lamp had not really been adequate to illuminate his work properly.

Then along came computers. It took a while before computers got good at graphics, even stationary ones. But of course they did eventually get good, not only at rendering still scenes, but also animations. Unfortunately Hollywood studios being able to afford high powered hardware and software did not make it accessible to the amateur movie maker.

The high price of professional 3D animation software led to the concept of Machinima. In Machinima inexpensive computer games are used to record 3D animated movie clips. Some computer games have a camera or record function built into them, and for others which do not, there are additional utilities such as Fraps, which can be used for recording the game action.

Popular Machinima games include Quake, Unreal Tournament and SIMS 2. These games come with the ability to design your own sets and characters, either as part of the main game itself or using utilities, which are provided with the game. Admittedly getting exactly the movie clips you want from these games can be challenging. I never did find out how to part characters in Unreal Tournament or Quake from their guns, which meant unless you wanted to make a shoot ‘em up movie, they were not ideal. No doubt obstacles like this could be overcome, but it seemed you could not get very far unless you were prepared to get immersed in scripting language. Of the three games I have mentioned, SIMS 2, is probably the easiest to use for making Machinima, except that the characters, or in our case actors, tend to have minds of their own. So your movie star may wander off part way through filming, or someone else you don’t recognize, might suddenly turn up and disrupt the scene you are shooting. With SIMS 2 you might even find your movie set spontaneously combusting during filming if you forgot to buy fire insurance. Perhaps this is like movie making in real life, but I would prefer not to have to put up with all of these uncertainties.

So you may wonder why no one has produced a budget software product, specifically for the purpose of making 3D animations at home. In fact Microsoft did exactly that in the mid 1990s with a product called 3D Movie Maker, which they targeted at the kids market. However the product was designed for early PCs, so it was pretty basic, on most home PCs it was slow, and it was soon discontinued. Recently there has been recognition of this unfulfilled need. Reallusion in particular, has developed a 3D animation movie maker called iClone. This software is pretty much a dream come true for anyone who wants to tell a story using 3D animation. In its basic form it costs about the same as a new top end computer game, while the more advanced and more useful Pro version is still very reasonable. Although you could make a whole movie in iClone, I find it is best to use it to construct a series of 3D animation movie clips and to then edit them together using Microsoft Movie Maker, or using a more advanced home movie editing suite such as Pinnacle Studio.

One optional utility, which I recommend purchasing bundled with the iClone, is Reallusion’s 3DXchange. This allows you to import content from other sources, including Google 3D Warehouse, which is a fantastic resource full of free models of buildings and other props, to enhance your 3D animations. Animations such as movies, presentations, walk through, cartoon films, television advertisements and web stuff (life on the Web or Internet) became popular after people tasted 3D graphics. In general Multimedia stuff such as 3D Illustration, AV Presentations, Digital Video, 3D Medical & Scientific Animations are very useful in real life application in respective environments.

Computer Graphics and Animations

3D computer graphics / animations are different from 2D computer graphics / animations in that a 3D representation of geometric data is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images. The rendered images are used for later display or for real-time viewing. 3D graphics animations show the angle of camera or viewers, virtual shoot of aerial footage and put the virtual reality 3D model into it perfectly so the 3D animation looks absolutely real. This is called motion tracking, which is when we track the exact motion of the real life camera that shoots the footage and that is replicated perfectly in 3D. The same effect is also used often on the big screen where 3D animations are used to create movie scenes.

Making of 3D Animations

The 3D animations are created based on a theme or concept. The theme is expanded with more detail of the design; flow of the animations is called storyboards. The character and object design and development are the preliminary jobs for animators based on the specification. Based on the storyboard direction further key frames are to be developed. All the characters or objects are called 3D models that are data file that contain the information needed to view or “render” 3-D objects. Key framing is the process of assigning values to parameters at specific moments in time that specifies frames in an animated sequence. A Texture Map is required for manipulating the scheme or pattern on the models. Texture Mapping is a way of controlling the diffuse color of a surface on a pixel-by-pixel basis, rather than by assigning a single overall value. The graphic designer / character developer can achieve by applying a color bitmap image to the surface. The color patterns / scheme can also be generated by the application itself to create a procedural texture. Finally, the sequences are to be rendered for getting an output with compression. Rendering is the process of producing bitmapped images from a view of 3-D models in a 3-D scene. An animation is a series of such renderings (taking a picture of the scene) each with the scene slightly changed.

3D animation software features:

3D Modeler, TrueType font support, Import and modify file formats, Export .3DS files, Built in 3D Object browser, Jointed character editor, Morph targets, Renderer for high quality, production quality images, Create 3D scenes and animations and output .AVI movie files, .JPG and .BMP images, Supports textures, bump maps, soft shadows, spotlights, fog, and much more, Texture support for .BMP, .GIF, and .JPG format files, Scripting language etc.