Alright you've made it this far. Keep on going this is the cool part to
Computer Art.

ANIMATION

Let's define some terms. Frame: The smallest part of an animation, which would result in one rendered picture. Keyframe: The start and stop of an event in an animation over a set number of frames (i.e.: start frame 0, stop frame 60). This event could be the scaling, rotation , or change of position of an object. Tween: The frames of an animation that happen between the start and stop of an event (i.e.: frames 1 through 59). Ok now that we have got those terms out of the way let talk animation. If the example on the left looks a little like the Editor, you are right. All of the things that you did to your scene in the Editor are now brought into the KEYFRAMER. The Keyframer is where you apply the settings to add motion to your scene and the information from the editor is the starting point for your animation.

The first thing to do when creating an animation is to determine how long the animation needs to be. This will determine how many frames you'll need. So if you want an animation to last 10 seconds the number of frames you'll need for a smooth animation will be around 240 or 24 frames per second. So if you are doing a full length animated motion picture the number of frames would be in the ten's of thousands.

Now we know how long it needs to be, so how do we make it move?

Well the basics are pretty simple. First you set your keyframer to the frame you want the animation to stop, you then move, rotate or scale your object at that frame. For example, in the picture above the RED part of the HOW 2 logo is being moved from point A (frame 0) to point B (frame 30) along a path (The path is seen as the red line in the upper left view in the picture above). This is not the same path used in the lofter, it has similar properties but works in a different fashion. Frames 0 and 30 then become keyframes in your animation.

The computer then calculates all of the frames between frames 0 and 30 to determine where the object will be in the scene or how big it needs to be if you are scaling it up or down in size.

To add additional movement to the object, you would move to the next point in the keyframer you want the movement to stop, and then tell the object what you want it to do again. By repeating this procedure you could have an object change position, scale, and rotate over the entire animation. You can also combine these movements over the same set of frames to have an object change position, scale, and rotate at the same time. This is how complex movement is created.

Well that's all there is to it-- well the basics anyway. The pictures are then rendered by the computer and saved to disk. The amount of time it takes to render depends on the length and complexity of the animation and the power of your computer or computers. It is not uncommon for a simple animation to take as long as two to three days to render.

Well that's all there is to this animation stuff or for that matter this whole
HOW 2 PAGE.

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