Computer Animation

A picture is worth 1000 words. Tom and Jerry cartoon, being the all time favorite of many is enjoyed even without the dialogues. Who wouldn't love the jolly green ogre and humors donkey in the movie Shrek? Movies like Shrek and Finding Nemo, has taken animation to a great heights. Animation is one of the powerful and smartest product in Hollywood. Walt Disney's animated characters are world famous icons adored by several people in all parts of the world. You can see computer animation everywhere, right from the Animated E-Cards, logo, animated screen savers, commercials, TV shows, computer games and movies. There are several fun games, animated tutorials teaching vocabulary and math to children. It is the animation that attracts kids to use computer even at preschool level. The advancement in computer technology has revolutionized the field of animation. It is swiftly growing and has huge impact on all ages to people.

What is animation?
Animation is the technique of sequencing several drawings and creating a rapid movement to add life to it. The speed in the movement creates optical illusion and the persistence of vision makes the picture realistic. In this the drawings seems to move. Animation is the realm of fantasy. Flip book is one of the simple sample of animation. It consist of sequence of drawings in every page of the book and when it is flipped rapidly by thumbing, it creates an illusion of motion. Creating an animation is time consuming, strenuous work. Each drawings or the frame in the sequence, must be blend seamlessly with the other frames to create smooth and continuous motion in time. Time line is very important in this too. For one second of animation, they use 24 frames.

Animation types:
With the advancement in technology, there are several techniques used in animation. Traditionally, animation was created by hand drawing the pictures frame by frame for the action. It is quiet tedious and time consuming. Computer animation removes the need for many of the extra tools required to create an animation. Computer animation with 2D and 3D techniques, is widely used. Images generated through this technique is known as Computer generated images (CGI). Animation involves storyboarding which sequences the scenes and actions of the character. The sound track are done even before creating the actual animation because it determines the timing of the frame. But they redo this every time until they get the final perfection. 3D animation involves modeling, animating and rendering the 3D scenes. Clay animation, stop motion animation, puppet animation are several other techniques.

Animation softwares and career
In 1937, Walt Disney produced the first full length animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Animation requires people skilled in different arts like drawing to produce wonderful images, huge and endless imagination and creative designing, planning the scene, adding sound track and giving special effects. There are several latest fantastic tools for creating the animation. Commonly used one are Macromedia flash, fireworks, Adobe creative suit, photoshop, Anime studio pro, Maya, 3D Studio from Autodesk, and many more. Animation courses are given in several specialized arts and animations colleges worldwide. A student from these universities will have the potential for a career in the dynamic fields of web design, animation movie making, video game art, advertising and graphic design.

Animation applications
Sultan: The Warrior is a forthcoming animated Indian film which is to be released in early 2009 worldwide. The main character is an animated version of super star Rajinikanth (A prominent actor in Indian filim industry) and will also be voiced by him, has big expectations by his fans. Animation is not only used for entertainment. It is also used extensively in marketing, used to present meteorological data, medical imaging, in architecture industry to create models of proposed buildings, in engineering to design new devices and vehicles.

Cuil Search Engine

Cuil is the latest search engine that has hit the internet world and many bloggers are referring it as "Google Search Killer" (which I personally do not think is the case), but honestly I had mixed feelings about it. It has been started by ex-Google employees Anna Patterson, Russell Power, and Tom Costello (Anna Patterson's husband). They also claim to have a much cheaper way to index web pages. The company has raised $33 million in venture capital.

I do not know how well Cuil search perform in a long run but these are my personal observations on day one (July 28, 2008).

Cool Features of Cuil:-

• Very nice multi column magazine-style layout including images in search results.
• Cuil has 120 billion Web pages, more than any search engine.
• It will not store our search history/IP addresses which is a big "Yay" for people concerned about the on the internet.
• It also proclaims an inbuilt intellisense to yield better search results.
• Since Cuil does not base it's results on how sites link each other(Google uses link patterns as a part of their algorithm), it will be good for the internet world and reduce spam linking on blogs and websites.
• Cuil does offers an "Explore By Category" section in its search results.
• Cuil's low cost method of running a search engine.

Things I did not like:-

• The site went down multiple times as they were probably not expecting a huge volume on day one. I am sure most people were checking it out rather than a long term commitment.
• I searched for the word "Cuil" and it returned no search results which I thought was quite odd.
• Less than half the times I found what I was searching for, there is certainly a room for improvement in their search algorithim. Several less popular sites were not showing up even when I specifically searched by their name. Sometimes the thumbnails within the search results were also off or irrelevant.
• Cuil (pronounced "cool") itself is not a great name and they could have purchased another short domain name by spending some money which was more easier to pronounce and remember.

So the score on Day One Google v/s Cuil is ... Cuil 0 Google 1 On day one, Google outpreformed them both in search relevancy and result returns.

I somehow feel that we will see a much better response and search results from Cuil in the days to come as today their servers were literally bombarded. Anna Paterson in the year 2002-2003 had written a search engine used by the Internet Archives, which was eventually was sold to Google itself.