ANIMATION 101

Have you ever wondered how CG movies are made? As you might imagine, it takes a lot of people and a lot of time - four years in most cases. Each second of animation you watch is a compilation of 24 frames. On average, a full length film is about 120 minutes. That is approximately 172800 frames of animation; after many months of hard work in building the animation, it's time to render it into a film. On average a single frame of animation can take more than 15 hours to be rendered!

Aside from all the fun, animation is serious work! GRAPHICTERMINAL ENTERTAINMENT® can help ease the burden by developing assets that are later used in animation. The process involved in developing an asset is often complex and requires a lot of attention and care. GRAPHICTERMINAL ENTERTAINMENT® has contributed to each of the following pre-production stages of animation.

STORYBOARDS

Storyboards are drawings in sequence styled like a comic book to serve as the blueprint for the action and dialogue of the movie.

CONCEPT DESIGN

In order to find the character, many illustrations are made by the concept artist. This can sometimes include many facial expressions.

3-D MODELING

From the initial concept design, our modelers will construct the digital 3-D model.

TEXTURING

The 3-D artist will prepare the digital 3-D model and paint on it using a 2-D program so that the appropriate surface effect is achieved.

RIGGING

The modelers will then add a rig system which is essentially a skeleton with various controls that will allow the animator to controls the character like a puppet on strings.

SKINNING

Next, the muscular system of the character's body is added. When a bone is animated, the digital 3-D model will deform accordingly to mimic the muscle in the tissue.

ANIMATION

A small test animation is developed and rendered to determine if the asset is free from problems and that the rig system is intuitive and easy to use.