How Mathematics Helped Us To Create 3D Animated Movies

Mathematics is the 8th wonder of the world

Mathematics is arguable the greatest invention of mankind. Nothing is possible to understand without mathematics. Particularly, calculus is the most important branch of mathematics.

I was astonished when I read the book Infinite powers: How calculus reveals the secrets of the universe. I have written a summary of the book in the article. If you are interested, you can check it out:

3D animation movies were hard to create because it was really hard to form curved shapes. We, humans, are great when we are dealing with geometry. We can deal with lines, triangles, rectangles, squares, etc. easily. But when it comes to curved shapes we find it hard to create spheres.

That’s where mathematics or I should say calculus helps us to combat this problem. There are mainly two branches of calculus — differentiation and integration.

We have solved the problems with curved surfaces using both differentiation and integration. First, you break the curved surface into infinitesimal pieces such that each piece can be represented using straight lines and then we solve these small pieces. Finally, we put together the solution of small pieces and get the solution for the curved space.

This is exactly how we have created 3D movies. First, we create a small polyhedron (liner surface), and then we put together thousands of these polyhedrons to create a body (curved surface). We can’t directly create curved surfaces. We have to create liner surfaces first and from there we can create curved surfaces.

The only costly thing here is the computational power. By computational power, I mean how long a computer takes to create 3D animations. If you can put together infinite polyhedrons to create a body, then you can create very realistic 3D animations but it requires supercomputers.

Mathematics is wonderful. Perhaps the best thing ever. I will keep sharing these cool mathematics facts.