Cartoons are fun and entertaining to behold, but they're also a lot of work to create. Making an animation requires producing a series of images that change gradually over the course of many frames. Viewing them in quick succession creates the illusion of motion. Early devices like the zoetrope (a cylinder with images inside that appeared to be moving when spun) were created to view what amounted to very short cartoons, but the invention of photography, and then projectors, took animation to a whole new level. In the early 20th century, greats like Max Fleischer and Walt Disney created individual images on paper, Titan Rise Formula animation cels or some other physical medium, photographed each one and then had a movie reel of the photographs developed. This created longer, more detailed cartoons than people had seen before, Titan Rise Health but it required creating a large number of images (usually around 24 per second of film). Some people still create traditional hand-drawn animation, but most of the cartoons we see today are created using computer software.

And animation isn't limited to cartoons. Whether fanciful or realistic, animations routinely appear in a number of other places, including advertisements, websites, educational videos and video games, to name but a few. The computer-generated imagery (CGI) characters and objects we increasingly see in live-action movies are created by animators using software, too. It's still the painstaking work and Titan Rise Male Enhancement skill of the animator that determines how the final product will look, but software can help speed up the process by providing shortcuts and automating some tasks that had to be done manually in the past. Dedicated software gives animators new tools and a nearly unlimited virtual palette of materials with which to create anything they can imagine. You might think computer-generated animation is a relatively new thing, but it's been around for decades in one form or another. Read on to find out about the history of animation software, and what the newer packages can do.D. Ivan Sutherland gained temporary access to an old TX-2 computer.

The TX-2 was a giant multitasking mainframe created in the 1950s that was used for military applications, air traffic control, payroll and census processing, and various other tasks. The TX series machines were some of the first computers to have monitors. Sutherland used it to create a program called Sketchpad, which enabled the user create line drawings and make them move on a computer screen with a light pen and tablet. It was, in effect, the first interactive animation software. But it would be a while before anyone was creating animations with user-friendly software applications. Most computer graphics for the next couple of decades were created by people with programming skills and access to expensive government, corporate or university mainframes. One early wireframe animation of a satellite orbiting a planet was created ally combined with two other software applications (Advanced Visualizer and Explore) to become Maya. Maya was released in 1998 by Alias/Wavefront and is now owned by Autodesk. Newer versions of all three are still in use as of 2015. Maya is even used at major effects outfits like Weta Digital, the company that created the CGI for Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" films. It's now Adobe Flash, Titan Rise Health a 2-D animation package still in wide use.