16.10. Further Information

If you're serious about animated effects, you really should read Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, by two of the "Nine Old Men" of Disney animation fame, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston (1981). This book is loaded with color images and insight into the development of the animation art form at Disney Studios. It contains several decades worth of information about making great animated films. If you can, try to find a used copy of the original printing from Abbeville Press rather than the reprint by Hyperion. A softcover version was also printed by Abbeville, but this version eliminates much of the history of Disney Studios. A brief encapsulation of some of the material in this book can be found in the 1987 SIGGRAPH paper, Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation, by John Lasseter.

Rick Parent's 2001 book, Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques, contains descriptions of a variety of algorithms for computer animation. The book Game Programming Gems, edited by Mark DeLoura (2000), also has several pertinent sections on animation.

Particle systems were first described by Bill Reeves in his 1983 SIGGRAPH paper, Particle SystemsA Technique for Modeling a Class of Fuzzy Objects. In 1998, Jeff Lander wrote an easy-to-follow description of particle systems, titled "The Ocean Spray in Your Face," in his column for Game Developer Magazine. He also made source code available for a simple OpenGL-based particle system demonstration program that he wrote.