Adobe Flash is a perfect tool for
animators working on the web, but it’s also ideal for broadcast production.
Flash allows the user to create movies within movies. For instance, we could
create a Flash clip of waves going up and down to place behind a fish we want
to animate.
Adobe After Effects (AE) is the
mainstay for animators and editors in the industry. Often, a Flash animation
will be exported then composited in AE. Graphics and text can be given motion,
and objects can be tracked to a specific reference point. For instance, one
thing we’ve done in a few of our series is have the host hold out their finger.
We then animate a spinning Earth on top of it. The hosts can then talk about
the mini-Earth while explaining the science. Few other programs can do this as
easily as AE.
Many 2D animations attempt to give
the reality of a 3D world. When we talk about 3D animation, we usually refer to
animations that were created by moving a camera around a three-dimensional
object to give a perfect representation of the model. For certain applications,
rendering something in a 3D world saves a lot of time.
Let’s say we want to animate a
molecule of water by having the molecule spin. Animating this in a 2D space
would require us to create images for every frame of the spin then cycle those
images together to create the illusion of a 3D environment. With a 3D editing
program, we simply model three spheres into the shape of a water molecule, and
tell the molecules to spin for any length of time we desire. The computer
renders the in-between images perfectly. There are several programs on the
market for 3D animation, including Blender, Maya, Lightwave, 3d Max, Vue, and
Google Sketchup.
superb
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