Commercial Products
Movies use commercial software such as Houdini to create models and animations. These software packages are much more complicated than what was used in the tutorial with Theodore. In such a package, we can specify how our model is lit, where we are looking at (camera) and render it so our shadows are calculated for our scene.
Here's a view of what Houdini looks like with the Theodore model
shown in wire frame, as well as the lights and camera:
Here's a view of what Theodore looks in Houdini, shaded. The embedded
window shows a rendered image, which is lit as we specified and has
shadows for the model.
Sample Movies
Here's a short movie of Theodore that is created and rendered in Houdini.
You will need to have Quicktime installed
to view it on your computer.
Here's a short movie called Geromino that is created in the Computer
Graphics Lab at the University of Waterloo. This short film (less than
3 minutes of animation) took a team of students almost two years to make!
Animation and Graphics Applications
One of the first animations created with the computer is called Hunger. Marceli Wein, Waterloo professor, invented key framing and was awarded an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his early work in computer animation.
Computer graphics are not just used for making special effects in movies and animation. They are used in many fields such as visualization tools in medical research, recreating historical scenes and sites, and envisioning architecture. Computer science is integrated more and more into different fields, and compliments research done in different areas. Even artists are exploiting computers to create animations that look like water colour paintings, and animations that help them visualize music.