Visual Effects and Creature Animation
Character animation is often contrasted with creature animation, in which specialised animators bring to life realistic animals and creatures, such as dinosaurs and fantasy creatures. Visual effects animators specialise in animating vehicles, machinery, and natural phenomena such as rain, snow, lightning and water, as well as the "non-natural" effects often seen in science fiction films. There is a good deal of overlap between these areas. Sometimes, visual effects animators will use the same principles of character animation; an early example is the pseudopod in The Abyss.
On-going computer science research on character animation deals with the question of generating multi-layer level of detail at run-time to allow large crowd rendering in real time applications.
Read more about this topic: Character Animation
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