animation tips and tricks

Animation Tips and Tricks

Animation Tips and Tricks
11. Mess up your physical work
Fill physical shots with all slips, falls, hitches, bumps and misses. Audiences get bored of watching perfect runs, jumps and tackles. Creating a little chaos is fun to watch, and its impressive to see an artist who can animate their way out of a situation thats gone awry.
12. Learn a little about mocap
Youre putting yourself at a serious hiring disadvantage if youve never worked with, or even seen, mocap data. Even if you plan to work at an all-keyframe studio, you may have to handle the stuff. There are many free mocap clips online, and 3D Worlds disc includes mocap data from time to time.
13. Bookend trouble spots
Sometimes an animation contains hitches you just cant remove, try as you might. Bookend this section by selecting all the controls and setting keys just before and after the hitch. Now delete the offending keys, knowing that you have walled off any destructive effect on the rest of the sequence.
14. Do more of less
Take on shorter shots for practice. The reason you practise is to get better for the industry, so practise the length of shot you are likely to encounter on the job, which will rarely be more than 10 seconds. Youre more likely to finish shots that are manageable, gaining skills from blocking through to final polish.
15. Principles of Physical Animation
Learn the techniques the pros use to create lifelike animation and character movements.
16. Principles of Emotion in Animation
Theres more to animating than drawing. Discover how emotions play a key role in every great animated picture.
17. Animation Notes from Ollie Johnston
John Lasseter shares what he has learned from Ollie Johnston (Presented at SIGGRAPH 94, Course 1)
18. Work In Progress
Learn about good character development by watching one of our recent Works In Progress.
19. Master Disneys12 Principles of Animation
Over three decades old, this classic by Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas is still to this day held in high regard as the animators bible. While its true that the number of self-taught computer animators keeps growing each year, with the wide availability of training materials, literature, and software on the internet, those trained in academic settings know whyDisneys 12 Principles of Animationis still a standard textbook for introductory animation courses across the world. The principles detailed in this book are still relevant for todays computer animation techniques, and mastering its techniques will assuredly translate to an improvement in ones skill set.
20. Learn proper motion blurring techniques
Computer animation, no matter how fantastical, imitates real objects and settings. Specifically, film cameras capture life. Audiences are accustomed to the nuances and artifacts of live action film, including the way cameras render the motion of objects and people. Motion blur is a subtle but powerful perceptual indicator that not only tells the viewer that the object is moving, but also the speed and direction it is moving. To properly convey and enforce the illusion of movement, incorporate motion blurring techniques to make your computer animations come to life.