Contents 3D Animation Overview Getting to Know the Production Pipeline Understanding Digital Imaging and Video Exploring Animation, Story, and Pre-visualization Understanding Modeling and Texturing Rigging and Animation Understanding Visual Ef fects, Lighting, and Rendering Hardware and Sof tware Tools of the Trade Industry Trends &… 3D Animation Overview 3D animation has become a mainstay in film, television, and video games , and is becoming an integral part of other industries that may not have found it all that useful at first. Fields such as medicine, architecture, law, and even forensics now use 3D animation. To really understand 3D animation, you must look at its short history, which is tied directly to the history of the computer . Computer graphics, one of the fastest growing industries today, drives the technology and determines what computers are going to be able to do tomorrow. In this chapter, you will look at present-day 3D animation and then look back at how the past has shaped what we do today.