Things have changed quite a bit since Gertie the Dinosaur lumbered out of Winsor McCay’s pen in 1914. 3-Dimensional animation is stealing the spotlight from its 2D predecessor at a more furious pace than most would have imagined possible. Most of the highest grossing animated films in the last few years were animated on the computer screen before playing on the big screen. It seems that traditional cel animation is beginning to die out just like Gertie’s real-life counterparts.

A Rising Tide
Video games, once a haven for simple programmer-created sprites, are becoming increasingly visually sophisticated as each generation of hardware is introduced. It is no longer acceptable to have a simple block hitting another simple block or to have a 2D sprite chase another 2D sprite around a flat landscape. The great majority of today’s animated entertainment comes to us in 3 dimensions.

What all this means is that if you look toward the future of animation there is a fully rendered, highly detailed, incredibly animated face looking right back at you. There will always be a place for the more traditional form of animation, but the workload of 3D is only going to increase. If you want to stay relevant in the world of animation you must have, at the very least, a working knowledge of computer generated animation. A good place to start is the book Animating Real-Time Game Characters by Paul Steed.

According to the book, Paul Steed has been working in the video game industry for 11 years and his experience shows. This volume covers all the basics anyone would need to create a real-time game character from scratch. It follows a logical line of progression from designing a character through modeling, rigging (building a skeleton to move your model), weighting (attaching your model to the skeleton) to animating. All of the basics are covered with enough detail that someone who has never animated in 3D before should be able to have a character up and running (or walking, or shooting) by the time they have finished the book. This is no small feat considering all the different disciplines one needs to master in order to accomplish this. Many game companies now hire separate artists to design, model and animate their characters so gaining knowledge in each of these fields could lead to one in which the reader may eventually want to specialize.