How to best defend Procedurally Generated Animation vs Conventionally used animation Techniques? Like Keyframe Vs Motion Capture VS PGA vs Phy. Dyn.
They both have their place, so it's not an either-or issue.
Procedural animation is necessary for massively complex systems, like fluid simulation over a rocky terrain, or for a virtual crowd, like an army.
You can't manually key-frame animate ten thousand soldiers.
However, artists prefer to have as much artistic control as possible, so there has been a lot of work in artistically "directed" procedural animation.
The "holy grail" is a blend where you have high-level artistic control over the crowd, or fluid behavior, but the details are generated procedurally.
This is just a natural evolution of animation.
The first animations were done frame-by-frame. Then key-frame animation allowed artists to automatically interpolate the in-between frames via splines, but still doing it for every joint in a character.
Then IK and bio-mechanical simulation + AI (e.g. Endorphin) allowed to only specify the foot and hand movements, or even just the high-level character movement and automate the joint angle animation.
Crowd-sim systems, like Massive allow an even higher-level control for an entire crowd.
So, we've been using procedural animation ever since we stopped manually specifying character joint angles for each frame!
It really comes down to productivity.
Sure, you could hire a thousand very skilled artists (if you have the budget) and manually animate everything.
But we all have deadlines and the whole point of using computers is to automate tedious things.
Manually rigging and key-frame / IK animating 10000 soldiers, or the collapse of a wall made of 8000 bricks, fall under tedious, in my book.
For animating multitude of viruses, cells, and lot of biologcal stuff probably procedural animation since if you want to create an illustration that should resemble the life in a cell you should use hundred of thousand of that and as correctly stated by Gabor it will be impossible to do that.
"traditionl animation" is still useful when you need to focus on a specific molecule to show a mechanism. Sometime also procedural animation is more fun. Give a try to c4d mograph or houdini to know why :)
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