What is 2d animation?

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

If you are just starting your acquaintance with animation, then this article will be very useful for you, because it describes the history of the emergence of this most popular area of fine art, its main milestones, what is 2D animation in general and what are its differences from modern computer animation.

History

People have always tried to find a way to capture the reality around them in the picture. The first such attempts were made on the walls of caves by our very distant ancestors and now they are called rock art. But, oddly enough, already then, thousands of years ago, people were faced with the problem: how to depict a moving object in a completely static picture?

The first attempt - to draw animals with many crossed paws, imitating their movement, remained the only one for a long time. However, ancient clay vessels found on the territory of modern Iran with images showing step by step the movements of an artiodactyl animal showed that about five thousand years ago people stood at the origins of modern 2D animation. Furthera similar technique for depicting moving objects increasingly appeared in the cultures of various peoples and improved more and more.

Development

However, the broad masses learned what 2D animation was much later, when the fine arts were already at the peak of their popularity, and cinema as such had not yet been invented. The birthday of modern animation, as well as animation in particular, is considered to be July 20, 1877, when the world's first Optical Theater was presented in France.

Then the main thesis was laid down, defining what 2D animation is - a way of representing moving objects by means of a quick change of static frames, depicting, necessarily sequentially, different phases of one movement. In the future, this technology became the basis for the creation of the first projectors, cameras and, as a result, cinematography and animation. And unlike us, who know well what it is, 2D films at that time seemed to people something surprising, despite their imperfections. However, this was only the beginning of their journey.

3D animation

Over time, animation and cinematography grew, modified, acquired more and more fans and creators who brought more and more new things to this branch of world art. And with the development of computer technology, something appeared that could compete with the already established and generally accepted idea of animation. 3d appeared on the stageanimation. And if some time ago everyone loved and knew what 2d was, then the newfangled computer graphics seemed something unknown and therefore attractive.

The key difference in these directions is that in classical animation, two-dimensional images are used to create movement, which are occasionally given volume only due to individual artistic techniques, while in 3D animation, three-dimensional and computer-modeled images are taken as the basis models. They, although in the future, but can have all the characteristics of a real physical body, be it weight, density, features of the internal structure, etc.

Classical and computer animation

So what is the best animation style in the end? Alas, there is still no answer to this question. Each of them has a number of both advantages and disadvantages, which ultimately show the difference between 2D and 3D animation. For example, the classical one has its own unique style, for which many still love it. To create it, you need much less expensive specialized equipment than for three-dimensional, which, in essence, is somewhat offset by how painstaking and time-consuming the process is, to speed up which you need to hire a whole group of animators.

Animation in three dimensions looks somewhat simpler, because the process of its creation is partially performed by the machine, but not everything is so simple. To create 3D animation, at least a trained specialist who knows all the intricacies of this craft is required, and a specialist inin turn, good tools are required, which are often expensive, and time, because three-dimensional modeling, for all its apparent simplicity, is also a very laborious process. That is why entire teams of animators are still working on modern three-dimensional projects.