3D Animation
3D animation Chesham Buckinghamshire, 3D medical animation, pharmaceutical 3D animation, 3D animated logos, 3D, character animation, 3D architectural animation, photorealistic 3D product animation.
3D animation is basically 3D illustration that moves. Where an illustration is usually just one image, an animation is made up from a series of images.
Animation is created by changing the angle or position of an object a little at a time over multiple frames, so when played back it gives the illusion of movement. This is the idea behind any moving image, whether its 2D animation, 3D animation, stop frame animation, or even traditional film based video cameras.
Using the same powerful software as some Hollywood studios in blockbuster films, we can transform any idea or storyboard into a stunning 3D animation, guaranteed to impress.
View our portfolio for sample 3D Animation Projects >>>
The Process
Creating a 3D animation can be broken down into three distinct stages.
3D Modelling
3D modelling is the process of creating all the individual objects in a scene and applying textures to them. You can read more about this in our 3D illustration section.
Animation and Layout
The second, and probably most important stage, is the animation and layout stage. We animate the objects over time in a 3D space. We can control how fast it moves, its direction, speed, acceleration and deceleration rates and much more.
One of the most exciting recent advances in 3D animation software has been the introduction of powerful physics engines that help simulate real-world forces such as gravity and collision detection.
This lets us create very convincing movement when one object hits another. We can alter the weight, softness, bounce, friction levels and gravitational pull of an object to influence how it interacts with other objects.
These forces also come into play when we animate a character. We also need to set other parameters such as limiting the angles that legs and arms can rotate and how they react with each other parts of the character.
What if we want to make waterfalls fall, fire burn and smoke rise? For this we use particle systems. These can generate a mind-boggling number of individual particles that can take any form we choose.
To generate a realistic looking firework for instance, we would only use between 100-200 large particles that all emit and blast out from the same point and have a set life span of, say, two seconds. We can also make the colour and brightness of the particle vary over its lifespan.
When we move on to large realistic clouds, the computation gets much more complex. Now, instead of 100-200 particles, we may need in excess of 20,000 pixels depending on the size of the cloud. We can then set properties that effect how the clouds react when an object passes through them.
I will stop here in case I am boring you. I could write several pages on this subject of character animation and particles alone and the text above only really scratches the surface of what we can generate. But if you would like to see how it works, we would love to show you in person.
Rendering
As with 3D illustration, the final stage is the rendering where the software calculates the lighting and colours in the wire frames.
It can take a few hours to render a single image in a complex 3D illustration. Now take into consideration that to generate one second of animation we need to generate 25 individual frames. So, a relatively short 30 second clip would contain 750 frames. Now obviously we can’t set about rendering a 750+ frame animation if it’s going to take over an hour a frame. This is where we need to optimise things a little more than we would with a single illustration.
For large jobs we render over our network using every multi-processor workstation we have so we can achieve what we need within the deadline.
Our average animation job can be rendered over night and is ready waiting when we arrive to work the next day.
If it’s a very large job with a tight deadline, we can use dedicated render farms which have 200+ processors at their disposal to get the job done in record time.
3D feature film Avatar sets the benchmark for realism. But it comes at a cost. They had to use a massive render farm comprising over 40,000 processors (yes you read that right) to get the rendering done. To render a single frame of Avatar on a conventional workstation would take over 48 hours!
We can output our animation in number of different formats optimised for streaming over the web or output at high quality either SD or HD for DVD, Blu-Ray etc.
View our portfolio for sample 3D Animation Projects >>>
We have produced 3D animations for clients located in:
Amersham, Aylesbury, Beaconsfield, Chesham, Gerrards Cross, High Wycombe, Hemel Hempstead, London, Luton, Maidenhead, Marlow, Milton Keynes, Rickmansworth, Slough, Stockley Park, Uxbridge, Watford and Windsor.