[syco26]

I am still relativaly new to computer art and was wondering how is the best way to get into animation.I know 3D digital animation takes alot of time and money but I was wondering about 2D animation like avatars that move and web pages.What are the best programs to learn and do you have any links to sites that teach it?
Thanks in advance and sorry for being a little vague(don't know all the proper lingo)
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syco26

[cheney]

There are animated PNG and GIF format for standward old school raster animation. GIFs are not extremely versatile and they take alot of disk space to animate, but this is the common animation format from the internet of years ago. PNG is a newer format that allows for partial transparencies, larger color palettes, and other minor features. PNG format has a higher data compression compared to GIF format as a result of its larger color palette. Ulead puts out a really good animator for these formats as does Jasc.

The most popular animation format of later years is SWF. This is the extension for Shockwave and Flash animation. The upside to these formats is that they are vector based rather than raster based imagry, so they look smooth no matter what resolution they are blown up to. This means larger animations with smaller file sizes. Later versions of the software for these formats promotes more and more tricks and more fluid animation styles. The downside to his format is also that its vector based (how ironic?). This is bad because the animation is stored as mathmatical algorithms rather than image data. This is a bad thing, because the animation is rendered on the fly at the host sytem. If you have a modern computer then it will render prefectly well, but older systems have trouble keeping up with complex renders. Older systems present the data as choppy, slow, and unresponcive. The other upside to these formats is that they are programable, so websites can be created entirely in these formats, but it is strongly discouraged for compatibility issues.

The final concept of digital animation is 3D, which is the most commonly known. Although the image data is created, programmed, and stored in 3D data dumps it is rendered into a raster format for completion. So all the benefits of 3D software exist only for the benefit of the animator/3D artist you have a programmer on hand to program a 3D interface to navigate a 3D file rendered externally.

Although 3D animation is rendered into raster image data its not at all as limited as the first examples. MPG (most common digital media format ever created for animation, movie, and music data) format is incredibly versatile. All modern digital media is directly based or heavily influenced by MPG format. DVD, for instance, is nothing more than MPG2 with built-in security. This security evaporates once the data is pulled from the disk without any encoding or conversion. Even MP3s are nothing more than basic MPG format with an advanced packing algorithm. The most modern digital media type in existance is a hack of a hack of the AVI based on MPG4. Xvid is developing movie and animation codec based heavily on Divx5 which is a hack of AVI format invented by Microsoft (you honestly have to admit what few freeware contributions MS has made to the internet and digital community have been fantastic). The benefit of these formats is that they hide pixelation into the animation as the image sized is upsized for play. So its a scalable raster output (not entirely scalable, but still superior to any still raster image format). Ultimately that is the only benefit, but the downside is a huge file size for has become high resolution and extremely long animations (high res digital movies). These other formats were created as a result of attempting to juggle display the most superior image quality, but also attempting to decrease file size as much as possible. AVI is much decreased over MPG1 just as Divx decreases files sizes from AVI, and so on......

As a result 3D animation is often rendered into popular digital formats similar or ahead of the stuff used in DVD disks. These digital formats are always changing and developing as more and more people contribute to the freeware media developement arena.

As far as I know those are the only popular choices for digital animation. There are probably more obscure concepts I have missed, but this should give some info to think about.
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