Digital Animation: The Most Used Techniques

Digital Animation is one of the fields that underlies what in recent years has been considered a real technological revolution. Whether you’re talking about animated feature films, or referring to the world of video games, the ability to set a digital reality in motion is, without a shadow of a doubt, essential for the development of such projects. But what are the most used techniques in the Animation video industry? Often, in fact, we hear about the subject as if we were facing a single style of production, while in reality, we are referring to a very broad set of techniques, which requires clarity, to be fully understood. For this reason, in today’s piece, we will go on to explore some of the most effective and famous strategies of this world. Enjoy the reading.

It is the simplest type of Animation and the one that we can easily imagine. In essence, the images are processed with a computer, which does nothing more than sequentially frames of an entity in different positions, so that this gives the impression of being in motion.

This second style of digital Animation involves the development of projects using a program called Adobe Flash, or any alternative that can modify and save files in the .swf format. This technique is very common on the web, especially for the creation of short and simple sites and Animations.

The 3D Animation is, without a shadow of doubt, the most interesting, both for the application purposes, and both for the fact that it shows us the reality for how we actually perceive it. In this case, 3D objects are vectored and then colored with the use of textures. The movement of a 3D digital model occurs through the use of a sort of “wire”, as in the case of puppets. This phase is known as “rigging” and is the foundation of any Animation in three dimensions. This technique is the one on which we focused more on development and is the one that, to date, allows the realization of special effects in films and cartoons.

This technique is very common for the development of human faces and models. In practice, a basic expression is assigned, like that of a neutral face, and each emotion is associated with another, simply by changing the parameters of the initial one. Very common in the videogame world.

Always remaining in the field of human movements, the skeletal Animation divides the model into two parts. In the first, the outer one, we can see the texture of the character, while in the second we install a network of nodes, which allow the verisimilar movement of the subject.

The last digital Animation technique we are analyzing is motion capture. Particularly used as entertainment, this method exploits a photogrammetric system that is a system with many cameras, which is able to recreate human movement in a fluid and realistic way.