Introduction
Animation and graphic design is vital in many trades. From making advertisements to special effects in blockbuster movies, computer effects artists are in high demand. This article provides a very quick introduction to the various steps of animation, including modeling, setting up materials, and rendering. These skills are pertinent in all fields of design. While this article does not cover technical details, it includes plenty of pictures to show the gradual evolution of a scene. This article was written in conjunction with iHOT team 1414 (the team has an animation group which creates animations to represent the team). iHOT won the national prize last year for their work in animation. This article was written by iHOT chief animator, Matthew Keeter.
Modeling Objects
The first stage of making a scene is modeling an object. You can start with basic objects like boxes (1), and edit them until they look like a car, or a horse, or a person. All objects are made of faces, or “polygons.” You can move individual faces around, and “extrude” them to make an object look different (2). By adding more faces, you can end up with complex models, which look like things in real life (3). You can have more than one object in a scene, so I’ll give my teapot a lid (4).
Achieving Realism
This teapot looks nice, but it still doesn’t look real. The next step in animation is creating materials that look real. This new material is white, and not as shiny (5). Most objects aren’t just one color. Animators use “textures” to make materials look more real. These textures are usually image files, or created by small programs that generate patterns like clouds or checkerboards. The teapot now has a cloudy material assigned to it (6).
Rendering
The final stage of animating is setting up a scene to “render.” When you render a scene, your computer calculates how the objects you’ve made should actually look. Rendering a scene can take seconds or hours, depending on the complexity of your scene. To prepare to render this scene, I’ll set up a surface on which the teapot can cast a shadow (7). Finally, you can place your completed model in a scene with other objects and effects (8).
Here’s a close-up of the tea liquid, which has been set as transparent and reflective:
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