Cartoons/Special Effects

[Aange10]

How do they do it? For instance, how did blockbuster make Shreck? Do they have to draw everything, pixle by pixle, and "animate" it that way? I don't figure they do;

I'm looking to make a cut scene for a program I'm making. However, I don't want to draw 100s of photos. How can I do this?

[Insectoid]

Animated films are built like video games. They create 3D models and environments and manipulate them. A lot of stuff is automated, like hair and water. Once the models and environments exist, all the animators need to do is choreograph the characters, which you can do with stick figures (but they don't).

Faces still get a lot of attention though, I think.

Oh, and yes, programmers had to build all this software. A lot of compsci graduates/co-op students end up at Pixar.

EDIT: You might ask why video games don't have Pixar's graphical quality. It takes days, if not weeks, to render the final movie on massive render farms and you couldn't hope replicate even James Sullivan's hair in real-time on current video cards.

[DemonWasp]

First off, BlockBuster has never made any movies, to my knowledge. Shrek is a product of DreamWorks Animation and Pacific Data Images, and was produced by DreamWorks Pictures, through Universal Pictures. BlockBuster is a defunct video rental store.

In particular, the technique used is called ray-tracing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) ). The basic idea is that the characters, effects, and scenes are created using 3D representations of these objects (which are first designed through concept art). Then, each shot of the animation (from the storyboards) is built into a single "scene" within the 3D software. Each scene is rendered by the software, and the final movie is stitched together, with some extra effects (transitions, light effects, etc) added to pull all of the clips together. Through the whole process, voice acting, musical accompaniment, and a million other concerns must all be factored in, leading to entire scenes being added, scrapped, or otherwise changed at a moment's notice.

This process takes a long time; a movie such as Shrek involves the participation of several dozen full-time people, several hundred people part-time, and probably a year or two.

That's not to say that you can't do ray-tracing on your own, just that it will be considerably less sophisticated and flashy. It will also be time-consuming. A good place to get started is with POV-Ray, a free (and relatively fast) raytracer.

[Raknarg]

If you're also considering a 2d animation, that really just takes a lot of art and time. Generally what they do is they have a picture for the background that the pan around and then they draw a new picture on top of that for every frame.

[Aange10]

Hmm. Thank you all for your responses xD. I simplified the cut scene.

Here you can see it, I'll put it on mega upload since I can't attach here.

(It's an assignment a friend gave me. The PDF is the instructions. Not done yet)

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ACF7BZNX