Computer Animation Week 1: History, Locomotion, and Animation

In the first week of our computer animation course, we were given a brief overview of the history of animation, and we also discussed simple locomotion and animation techniques. Animation is essentially a way to “bring to life” static images, to give the illusion of movement. This functions thanks to persistence of vision, which is a phenomenon where our eyes/brain retain images for a short period of time after they are gone. This causes quick, successive changes in static images to give the illusion of fluid motion instead of discrete images. Early techniques at animation included the thaumatrope, zoetrope, and praxinoscope, which were all devices that would rapidly swap physical images.

In a 2D game engine, sprites are used to represent characters. Sprites are essentially boxes that have a texture (the actual image of the character) mapped to them. The box itself has three properties: size, position, and rotation. These properties are what define the locomotion of the sprite. That is, locomotion is how the sprite (the box, and not the texture) move around on screen. The actual animation is defined by how the texture changes within the box, either by swapping the visible image (e.g. via a spritesheet) or by modifying the colour of the texture.