Week 12 Labs 1 & 2 - Online Tutorial Reflection

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

The animator need not have great drawing skills, but he/she must have sufficient amount of drawing skills in order to make the animation look plausible enough. No one would want to look at a sequences of non-readable scribbles in an animation. It must be clear enough to show what the animator is doing. More importantly is the 12 basic principles of animation. The animation will look better once the 12 basic principles are applied.

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

Basically, I think 3D animation would be easier on those who cannot draw very well. 3D uses models and meshes, so if you are more of a practical person, then you would fare better than people who can draw well. However, the good ability to draw = the good ability to picture things. If a person can picture things better, of course it would help them better in their animation. Best is if a person can have both at the same time.

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?

To decide whether a piece of animation is good or bad would be to check whether how many basic principles of animation are there in a piece of animation. If there are close to none in an animation, the audience would have no idea what the animator is trying to do. All the characters would be like robots, having not much or no realism at all. The next factor is the frames per second of an animation. If the frames per second of an animation is too low, the animation would look very choppy and not smooth.

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. Because of my past experiences with animation, I am accustomed to doing frame by frame animations with programs such as adobe imageready. I would usually photoshop a sequence of images, with each image slightly different than the previous image and then join them together using imageready. However, in Maya, the movements of everything is simplified and it saves time also. Now, I am trying hard to work with the interface of Maya as I am still not accustomed to animating with Maya.

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 feel that the interface of Maya is hard to work with. This is because the tools are situated in a very messy manner and that first time users for Maya or newcomers will have extreme difficulty getting accustomed to the interface. It is very hard to find what you are looking for, and one small mistake might lead you to having redo your entire animation. Even the playback of Maya is too fast, as when you try to play it normally in Maya (not playblasting), it does not adhere to the fps (frames per second) rate that I have set and moves abnormally fast, rendering me unable to see anything. However, what I like about Maya is the animation graph. It is easy to use and very good to refer to.