Engineering Is: Making Movies
Posted on October 28th, 2011 by axb
Cartoons have come a long way since the hand-drawn moving pictures of decades past. Now, the animated films at your local cineplex are made possible by sophisticated computer software created by engineers. Modeling the realistic textures and movement of such things as fur, hair and fabric, for example, takes serious computing power. Without it, the swashbuckling hero of Puss in Boots would look decidedly less so.
And when a cartoon character looks solid enough to touch, it’s thanks to a 3-D animation software package called Maya, now the industry standard. Clearly, it takes a lot of ingenuity to create characters that virtually pop off the screen.
