Basics of creating Animation for your Game

You can consider animation as the technique or procedure of making the illusion of motion with the illusion of transformation by way of the quick displaying of a sequence of images which minimally vary from each other. Just liek a Flip Book.

Technical people who create animation are called Animators, who are creative people, having specialized skills of developing animation. These animations can be of the form of analogue media or a flip book, animated motion picture film, videos and GIFs, digital media, which includes animated GIF, Flash animated files, videos etc.

The methods used for creating animation comprises of both traditional animation developing methods which involves stop-motion animation which can be either 2 or 3-dimensional objects, paper cut-outs, clay figures etc. Images get exhibited in rapid progression, which rates basically from 24, 25, 30, or 60 frames per second.

While Computer animation generates animated images with the computer-generated imagery (CGI). 3D animation requires computer graphics, whereas 2D animation focuses on stylistic, low bandwidth with faster real-time rendering capability.

In the world of games, graphic software is implemented for creating animation effect. Basic animation may be an animated gif image which is generally used in web pages. Animation becomes complex when you have to portray an animated replica of a human or alien face in computer software game or animation of a space battle.

Lists of some animation software

Below is a list of some of the popular and widely used animation and 3D animation programs.

• Blender(Free version available): http://www.blender.org/
• LightWave 3D: http://www.newtek.com/
• Elastic Reality and Avid 3D: http://www.avid.com
• Maya: http://www.alias.com/
• Macromedia Flash(free version available): http://www.macromedia.com/flash
• 3D Studio Max: http://www.autodesk.com/
• 3DPlus(Free): http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/
• Animation Master: http://www.hash.com/
• Motion Capture: http://www.metamotion.com/

Types of Animation

There are 3 major categories of animation:

• Traditional Animation:

  Traditional animation also known as hand-drawn animation is a type of animation where each one of the frame needs to be drawn by hand. This animation methodology became the most dominant type of animation in cinemas until the new era of computer animation arrived

• Stop Motion:

  This term basically describes the outline of animation which can be generated by physically controlling real world objects and photograph them one frame at a time, in creating the illusion of motion where the frames are played in sequence as a continuous chain of images.

  Various types of stop-motion animation are:

  • Puppet Animation
  • Cutout Animation
  • Clay Animation
  • Object Animation
  • Pixilation
• Computer Generated Animation:

  Computer assisted or computer generated animation is said to be a system which consists of one or more two-dimensional planes which computerize the traditional i.e. hand-drawn animation technique.

All these categories can be used to make both 2D and 3D images. Moreover, there are additional, less common forms, projecting their main focus in creating the images along with amalgamation of live action and drawings or computer generated images. Some other forms of animation are:

• Traditional animation
• 2D Vector-based animation
• 3D computer animation
• Motion graphics
• Stop motion

In game development there is a huge requirement for animators who can develop the models, objects and various scenes or game views. So, now that you have basic knowledge of animation, we hope you will be able to judge the requirements for the development of animation in your game.