Animation is really fucking cool

I'm a big fan of South Park, Family Guy and a few other cartoons, so yeah I know animation is really fucking cool, but today I got a very brief look behind the scenes at a very cool feature of the animation process.

A friend from uni was watching tutorial vidoes on YouTube during our lecture (don't judge him, I was watching hockey. I also learned today that Jake Muzzin is apparently really good at hockey after Toronto GM Kyle Dubas gave up a couple of prospects and a first round pick for him, but that's not the point of this post).

This particular feature of animation pertains to the way things like fire and explosions - phenomenoms of physics - are created artificially as animations. These modern programs have actual laws of physics embedded into their systems so that the animations of these things are as realistic as possible. It's not just some egg-head in a dark room doing some weird shit with some basic software - no, it's that the REAL eggheads (the programmers and software engineers) are bloody geniuses. What a concept. Isaac Newton would be so proud.

Software engineers and animators are fucking cool. That's what I learned today.