If you are just starting your acquaintance with animation, then this article will be very useful for you, because it describes the history of the emergence of this most popular trend in fine art, its main milestones, what is 2D animation in general, and what are its differences from modern computer animation.
History
People have always tried to find a way to capture the reality surrounding them in a drawing. The first such attempts were made on the walls of the caves by our very distant ancestors and now they are called rock art. But, oddly enough, even then, thousands of years ago, people were faced with the problem: how to depict a moving object in a completely static drawing?
The first attempt - to draw animals with many crossed paws, imitating their movement, for a long time remained the only one. However, ancient clay vessels found on the territory of modern Iran with images that show the stages of the movement of a cloven-hoofed animal, showed that about five thousand years ago people stood at the origins of modern 2D animation. In the future, a similar reception of the image of moving objects more and more often appeared in the cultures of various peoples and was increasingly improved.
Development
However, the masses learned what 2D animation is much later, when art was already at the peak of its popularity, and cinema as such was not yet invented. The birthday of modern animation, as well as animation in particular, is considered to be July 20, 1877, when the world's first “Optical Theater” was presented in France.
Then the main thesis was laid down, defining what 2D animation is - a way of representing moving objects with the help of a quick change of static frames, depicting, necessarily sequentially, the various phases of one movement. In the future, this technology became the basis for the creation of the first projectors, cameras, and as a result of cinema and animation. And unlike us, who know well what it is, 2D films at that time seemed to people something surprising, despite their imperfection. However, this was only the beginning of their journey.
3D animation
Over time, animation and cinematography grew, modified, and grew more and more fans and creators, who brought more and more new things to this branch of world art. And with the development of computer technology, something has emerged that can compete with the already established and generally accepted notion of animation. 3d animation appeared on the scene. And if some time ago everyone loved and knew what 2D was, then newfangled computer graphics seemed to be something unknown and therefore attractive.
The key difference in these directions is that in classical animation two-dimensional images are used to create movement, which are occasionally given volume only due to individual artistic techniques, while in 3D animation, three-dimensional and computer-simulated models are taken as the basis. They, although in the long term, but can possess all the characteristics of a real physical body, be it weight, density, features of the internal structure, etc.
Classical and computer animation
So which animation style is better in the end? Alas, there is still no answer to this question. Each of them has a number of advantages and disadvantages, which ultimately show the difference between 2D and 3D animation. For example, the classic has its own unique style, for which many still love it. To create it, you need far less expensive specialized equipment than three-dimensional equipment, which, in essence, is somewhat offset by how painstaking and lengthy the process is, to accelerate which you need to hire a whole group of animators.
Animation in three dimensions looks a bit simpler, because the process of creating it is partially performed by the machine, but not so simple. Creating a 3D animation requires, at a minimum, a trained specialist who knows all the intricacies of this craft, and a specialist, in turn, requires good tools, which are often expensive, and time, because three-dimensional modeling, with all its apparent simplicity, is also a very time-consuming process . That is why whole teams of animators are still working on modern three-dimensional projects.