Hughes/Computer Graphics, 3/E

Chapter 35. Motion

35.1. Introduction

When you see a sequence of related images in rapid succession, they blend together and create the perception that objects in the images are moving. This need not involve a computer: Cartoons drawn in a flip-book and analog film projection (see Figure 35.1) both create the illusion of motion this way. The individual images are called frames and the entire sequence is called an animation. Beware that both of these terms have additional meanings in computer graphics; for example, a coordinate transform is a “reference frame” and an “animation” can refer to either the rendered images or the input data describing one object’s motion.

Figure 35.1: An animation is a sequence of frames.

This chapter presents some ...