IN3D Week12 Lab1 & 2

Exercise 2
From your (still very) basic experience with 2D and 3D animation, discuss the following questions on your weblog.

1) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 2D animation? Explain your view.

Yes, since it is 2D animation, drawing well is essential. I remember those days when I was young, I would draw stickmen on the corner of a textbook on every page and flip the book quickly and watch the stickman animate on its own, but that's just a 'for fun' animation. A good 2D animation to me, is like disney movies and I watched before the making of disney movies, it's not easy drawing out everything that is needed in a frame for the entire movie.

2) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 3D animation? Explain your view.

With softwares like Autodesk Maya, 3D animation can be easily made by setting keyframes and constraints. The storyboard do not have to look good, just the main idea of the animation will do, hence I think that you do not need to be able to draw well to create good 3D animations.

3) What do you think would separate a piece of poor animation from a piece of good animation? In other words, how would you go about deciding if a piece of animation is good or bad?

For me, a good animation would mean that each and every frame has been well thought out and displayed out smoothly without knowing that there are done out in frame by frame. Which means considering all the minor details such as blinking of eyes and normal breathing in and out can be seen from animating a person. While a bad animation would show little or none of the ones mentioned in the good piece of animation.

4) In 2D animation, you need to be very aware of timing at a frame by frame level, using timing charts and other techniques - but for 3D animation, this is handled using the graph editor, which is more concerned with manipulating rates of change over time.

Does this affect how you approach your animation work? Explain.

Yes it does affect me in some way or another. Because by using graph editor, it sort of means there is mathematics elements involved which kinda makes animation more serious. For myself, I don't like the subject math, and I thought by going to poly can make me escape from math, but no. We still had to take computing mathematics while we were in year 1 and now animation has math and physics elements in it. This somehow adds on to the stress.

5) Give a brief critique of Maya as an animation tool. Don't just say Maya makes animation difficult, or easy, or that you need to learn a lot of stuff to use Maya - explain what Maya does well and not so well in terms of creating animation.

I think that Maya is a pretty powerful tool considering the fact that it is able to make animations as well, and that's if one knows how to use it, and I mean knows how to use every tool. Switching from 2D animation software, Pencil to a 3D animation tool, Maya, I think that the onion skin tool is useful to me and Maya can incorporate this in as well. Maya is good in a way that there are many shortcuts to use, such as pressing on 's' to set keyframe is so much easier than setting keyframes in Pencil software.