cars

[Fintan123]

What animation program is used to make 3d animated films?

[potterfan3]

Probally nothing you could buy of the highstreet. I'm guessing very soficticated animation software that was designed by the animation company themselves and will not be avilable for retail. Even if it was you'll need one heck of a RAM to run it and a big harddrive to actually save your animations

[trevHCS]

What exactly is used for actually producing the wireframe models I'm not sure, although there is something called Mayo out there apparently which does a pretty good job.

Looking into it, there seem to be a number of programs all linked up such as wireframe production, shading, textures and scene fillers which fill in some of the gaps in movement.

The final stage is to render the scene which brings everything together into one big frame (ie: 1/24th of a second of animation). If you have Maya then you can buy Renderman for Maya which hooks the Maya animation system up with the Renderman rendering system as used by Pixar themselves.

Of course if you want to produce Cars or Toy Story, you'll need a render farm which requires a heck of a lot of computers, are quite a bit of time as apparently it takes 6 - 9 hours to render a frame with their system! But if you don't then it's probably possible to do it with a RAID 5 array I guess.

http://www.pixar.com/howwedoit/index.html
http://www.renderman.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRealistic_Re nderMan

Trev

[Ralph]

The main 2 applications used for computer generated images (CGI) are Maya and 3D Studio Max (or 3ds max as it's known these days). Maya used to be owned by a company called Alias, but they were bought by Autodesk who produce 3ds max, so it's likely the two will merge in some form.

You can download a trial of both pieces of software, but be warned that their immense power and capability mean that they are very complicated to learn with any degree of proficiency.