The Computer Aided Design In Movie And Animating Industry

Computer Aided Design or CAD for short started its significance in many industries from the mid-1960s. Before computers were used in the process of designing, draftsmen relied on pen and paper and would take days or even weeks to complete the detailed technical drawings of a product. Now, engineers and designers can create 2D or 3D designs easily. Another advancement that came along was the possibility to use the design even further. With the data of each lines and surface, tied together with a growing database of material information, many kinds of analysis could be done, just by the click of a button and a few moments of waiting through the finite element analysis (FEA).

CAD has also allowed the transformation of the nature of work of an engineer. On a YouTube talk show, Jamie Hyneman (special effects expert who is widely known for being part of the Mythbusters team) gave his personal insight on how CAD has changed the way he design and make things in his career. Instead of traditional hand drawn and using hand held cutting tools, he was able to use a CAD software to quickly and accurately draw up a design, and send it to the plasma cutter for machining. Jamie also noted the chassis of telescoping forklifts, as he has noticed, were made from slabs of steel that were machined, also by the instructions provided to the tools from a CAD drawing. It goes to show that these CAD drawings are more than just digital representation of an object, but also information that can be used to instruct other tools. In this paper, I will be going through some unconventional uses of CAD, being uses outside of engineering design and manufacturing.

Movie industry

In the movie industry, it is safe to say that there are 2 main methods of creating a movie. Either through animation, or through live action filming. Traditionally, animated films were fully hand drawn, with transparent sheets (cel) being painted and layered over the background, all which takes a long time to produce. However, as technology grew, so did the influence of CAD in animated movie making.

CAD in animating

Back in 1995, the first ever fully computer animated film, “Toy Story” was created. The use of the computer graphics throughout the whole film was a big leap in the movie industry. The process of creating the movie included firstly the creation of the character models. Some models, such as Scud the pitbull, were made the same way as engineers would do – sculpt it with clay, followed by a digitization process where points on the surface was collected and surface fitting was done. Others however, were designed directly through the computer. By using CAD, the animators were able to use the 400 over CAD models to create the 1560 shots of the movie.