Computer animation

Computer animation creates the illusion of movement by generating or manipulating visual content with computers, in two or three dimensions.

Keyframe animation: An animation technique that specifies important poses or states and generates the motion between them. It defines major moments while software fills in the intervening movement.
Raster graphics: Images represented as rectangular grids of colored pixels. Raster images can serve as animation frames, textures, and painted backgrounds.
Animated film: A motion picture whose images are created frame by frame or generated from animated digital scenes. Feature films and shorts use computer animation to create complete moving worlds.
Traditional animation: Animation created through sequential hand-drawn images, often photographed from paper or transparent cels. It creates motion by drawing successive images rather than generating scenes digitally.
Interpolation: A method for estimating intermediate values between known data points. Animation software uses it to calculate changing positions, rotations, and shapes between keyframes.
Vector graphics: Images represented by mathematical paths and shapes rather than fixed grids of pixels. Vector shapes can be transformed cleanly and animated as independent elements.
Video game animation: Character, object, and environmental motion produced for interactive video games. Game animation must respond to player input and run in real time.
Stop-motion animation: Animation made by photographing physical objects in successive poses and displaying the images in sequence. It builds movement from photographed physical changes instead of computer-generated frames.
Skeletal animation: A technique that deforms a character model by transforming an internal hierarchy of joints and bones. It produces articulated character motion without reshaping the entire model for every pose.
Three-dimensional computer graphics: The creation and manipulation of digital representations of objects and scenes with three spatial dimensions. It provides the spatial models and rendering methods used in 3D animation.

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