As kids we have all seen sooo many cartoons, including the now-we-feel-boring-to-see-them epics..... though i feel the best ever cartoon was tom & jerry, it is still the best ! :D .....I've always had this fascination to know how these cartoons are made, how the characters are made, how they are animated, etc etc etc etc .......... lots to know !.....
Ya maybe tom & jerry was made using GIF animation or something else; but ever wondered how some of the characters like the ones in Shrek were made?? They were made fully in Maya, including the lighting & animation part !Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Image Ready, AutoDesk's 3Ds Max, AutoCAD & Maya , & Google SketchUp - these are some of the famous softwares which are very very... widely used for all creative things in the world ! AutoCAD is mainly used for making 2d drawings, & even for making some 3d models & even rendering them; but most of them prefer 3Ds max or maya for modelling & rendering as the quality of the end result is excellant in both ! When you make models in 3Ds max or Maya, & render them in the same, it gives you a more realistic look, and that maybe because of wider range of options, materials, lighting options & many other things in those 2 softwares, which are not there in AutoCAD. Even Google SketchUp is an excellant software for modelling, & it is a user friendly software too !
Ever wondered where the shootings of the movie 300 were done?? Well, it the shooting was done right in the studios ! Yes ! But before everything, a very elaborate storyboard was made, which showed the clear picture as to how the background has to be, how the charaters will be, what they'll wear, their expressions, etc etc etc.......... Then certain things like the mountains & hills & what not, that were there in the movie, parts of these were made using clay on the sets, yes the clay models were made, & the shooting was done., with a blue or green background. The main backgrounds were added later using a technique called the Chroma Key effect. For this effect either a green screen or a blue screen is used, as i have mentioned before.
There are quite a few softwares for this technique, like even Maya & Adobe Photoshop & After Effects are used for this. This technique allows the actors to put themselves in some totally imaginary places & situations like , in some space ships, or like he/she is dangling from a rope bridge over deep valleys n all, or flying through the air like some super man, & make it look completely real in the movie. Nowadays this technique is used so so so so.... often we people don't even realize it! Like, the news reporters are made to look like they are on location when they are actually not, or rather maybe sometimes cannot go, and also some complete segments in particular TV shows can be created this way to make it look like the scene was actually shot on that location, without even going there !! Interesting, isn't it? ;)Example:
