How To Animate In 3d
I am going to talk about the concept of animation in this post. Not just 3d, because 3d animation involves the same principles as 2d animation if you want to be a good animator. Many animators out there know how to animate in 3d, but they do not utilize the proper techniques. Sure it may be quicker to wing it and try and animate on the go, but the proper way always shines. The only type of animators that came close to winging it, were the stop motion animators, because they had to frame by frame move things to advance their animation sequence. With 3d and 2d animation, we have something on our side. It’s called time. Timing is everything in animation. You want something to move or look real and believeable you have to nail down the timing. To do that, it takes some hard work and dedication.
All animators should be using reference of some kind. If you have a character walk in to a room and sit down, or pick up a book, you carefully time each action. In animation school, they made us use a stop watch to see how long it took for us to get to each action. The main actions like entering the door, walking to the middle of the room, and picking up the book would be set down as key poses. The animator should always time the key poses and then position the character the way the would be in each pose on the animation timeline. In 3d animation, you would adjust the skeleton to fit the keyposes. Now when you have the key poses nailed down, the 3d software will automatically create in betweens from one key pose to the next. The movement should start to resemble the reference a bit, but it would still look off.
The next step is to basically create sub keyposes for the inbetweens. Check the timing of the next pose. It helps to video tape your reference rather than do everything from memory, because you can copy the keyposes and sub keyposes almost exactly and the movements will appear more natural. The key here is to keep creating keyposes at the proper points on your timeline so that your character’s movements will feel like its more lifelike. This goes for any type of character weather your doing 3d character animation or 2d character animation. If you follow these steps, your animation should start to feel like its occuring naturally and not so robotic.
Another thing to be aware of are the animation curves. Every 3d animation software should have some type of curve editor. This controls the speed of your character and weather or not they slowly slowdown, quickly speed up, or stop on a dime. 3d characters tend to look awfully funny when their motion is jerky or too smooth. Adjusting the curve editor can take some getting used to. Its one of those things that 3d animators have to learn and 2d animators don’t have to deal with. This is pretty much the basic idea for those wanting to know how to animate in 3d.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 12:06 am and is filed under 3d Animation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
