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Today's more advanced and efficient 3D animation tools are generating a variety. of business opportunities for creative professionals.
ever since Terminafor II more than a decade ago, 3D animation has become standard fare in blockbuster action movies. More recent films like The Matrix have shown that integrating computer-generated material into film footage can bend reality and create entire new worlds where fact and fiction are hard to distinguish. It's an attractive proposition for filmmakers trying to tell stories and stir the imagination, but animation isn't just for Hollywood. From flashing marquees in Times Square to Flash on corporate websites, rich media increasingly means taking advantage of a variety of communication tools, including 3D.
Admittedly, 3D isn't for everyone yet, although numerous companies have tried over the years to entice unsophisticated computer users and enthusiasts into a 3D world. However, the maturation of 3D production tools - from the depth of current 3D desktop computer software to the astounding math of today's fairly humble graphics cards -- is making for far more efficient and creative work from video professionals. And that is leading to new opportunities.
Evolving tools
Over the last 10-plus years, the industry has watched nonlinear video editing go from novelty to revolutionary to standard in professional postproduction. At first, digital video was quite a stretch for desktop computers and required serious expansion hardware sets. The payoff was just time saved in off-- lining. That's changed and, at least with single-stream DV, digital video is now just another type of data for desktop computers. This has brought the ability to edit almost anywhere, including on a notebook computer in the field.
3D animation is progressing along a similar curve today, although it's not as far along as video editing. The black boxes that today's 3D animation tools have replaced are the dedicated, big-hardware, Unix computers that were once necessary for professional 3D modeling. But even so, the growth rate of 3D remains behind that of video editing. Like editing video, 3D animation is a difficult craft and not one the average computer junky or corporate manager finds attractive. Yet, as professional tools improve...