My name is Megan and this blog is about animation.
References, inspiration, ideas, discussions, tips, anything that I see that can be applied to the art of animation.
Please take the opinions on this blog with a grain of salt. They come purely from me and my experience and although I am involved in the animation industry I am still learning lots and building on what I know. This blog is for me to even help myself think and learn about different aspects of animation I find and share it with you guys. A lot of it is opinion and I always enjoy discussions.
For now this blog is very default looking - as I go along I will be making it a bit more animation friendly (cough- better line quality -cough)
Hiya! I've followed for your animation stuff for a good while now, since your rigging is just absolute goals for me - I've been having some troubles trying to make a decent rig for my own animation, and was wondering how your process of rigging goes, as from what I've seen online, there's quite a few different ways people will make rigs (be it different deformers, or little to no deformers at all; junk like that :"D) Any tips or advice would be extremely appreciated! <3 Asketh - Anonymous
I would say start small ! the first rig I let my students build when I was teaching was a little blob animal with eyes, a mouth and some ears or a tail ..something you could do more fluid animation with. It keeps it to simple shapes and limited details .
Work your way up to fuller characters , because the more you rig the more you realize what things are a pain in the arse haha, so you are able to design characters that are a little more forgiving to learn on rather then just designing something you love and running into road blocks on how to rig those details correctly .
Also keep in mind that the rig kind of depends on how -you- animate. For myself I dont need too many bells and whistles, i just need the parts to be seperated. I need to be able to do rotations , and if i just have one big chunk of hair i cant really show it turning perpsective wise, so i want the lil chunks WITHIN that chunk split up.
Breaking off details and splitting them up for me is where you want to start, so the more details you have the harder it is. The deformers and what else you want to add is up to you - some people love em, some people dont ! and actually my rigs would be a pain in the ass for a lot of people to animate with, but they work for me just fine.
in the end though its not the rig that makes the animation , its the animator. you can have a perfect rig but its going to be the traditional principles that makes the animation look good. A good rig is a good tool ,but the success of the animation does not lie soley within it.
ok…im sorry this one turned out fuzzy and its hard to see the timeline. : / I dont know what messed up in my recording settings and at one point the screen shifts but this is my 3rd time trying to upload it and its getting late and I DONT CARE ANY MORE. ALSO MY MIC STILL CUTS OUT..I tried to edit around it but I may have to get a new mic for my next video because its annoying and makes editing so time consuming.
ITS SUPPOSE TO BE CASUAL SO ..WHO CARES IF ITS NOT PERFECT.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
HUFF HUFF
I get into animation with this one - if there is anything you want me to go more indepth on , or pick out to have its own video please let me know .
might as well share this to my anim blog as well since I didnt reblog the other one her. for anyone whos interested I made a new account JUST for toonboom harmony. Im open to suggestions and questions !
What are the processes a scene goes through and what are they for? I know that there is a certain order like storyboards > animatics > pencil test > cleanup > but that's about the limits of my knowledge Asketh - Anonymous
As far as animation goes , yep ! although every studio has its own work flow. For example some will have FX animation after clean up , some will have color if the animation is not colored already. Compositing is also an important part of the polish. And of course we cant forget the designs that go into it in order to make the scene full of visuals.
There are more stages that a scene can go through depending on the departments basically. In some studios overseas the animator would do their pencil test/clean up/ bgs AND fx all at once. The process is still one by one but their responsibilities are larger.
I presented this in the order of how I slowly understood the trick of delivering force - first an abstract concept of impact taught by Ah Fai, then a more complicated discovery on the acceleration pattern, last back to a more abstract concept of breakdowns.
Like I’ve previously stressed, 2D animation is everything but one single approach. There’s no one rule that rules them all, but interchangeable ideas with math, or physics, or music, etc. There’s no “perfect” animation either, but what is perceived as organic and dynamic. E.g., using the Fibonacci numbers to animate didn’t bring me a perfect animation! On the other hand, a tiny change in the pattern could already make the feeling of force so much more powerful.
Not so much of a tutorial than a personal experience. I hope you find this interesting hahaha
The other day I came across this awesome program by accident
(I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several
times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.
It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.
There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be
downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79.
I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I
haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The
website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well.
Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the
features available in both versions.
There are three features the free version doesn’t have:
Can’t save OBJ files for export
Can’t download models and poses from Doll
Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)
It can’t load saved files
The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and
close the program, you can’t load that
pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I
found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why
reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you.
But, the default
model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference
it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:
There’s a pose tag
that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and
waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much
follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.
Even the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See, like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:
The morphing tag
is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and choose from
a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones. Don’t like the
options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider that
lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design.
So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii
Muscle-chan!!
The scale tag
lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different joints. This
feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body shape
variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more digitigrade
model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)
Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant
hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.
The ability to pose
hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from
a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers.
And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like.
In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.
Basically, this program is awesome and free and you should
totally check it out if you want a good program for creating pose references.
I just wanted to add a little more to this. If you have trouble figuring out how light sources work in your drawings this also allows you to choose where to have a light source.
That shaded ball on the left is your light source. You can see how moving the point changed the shadow cast.
Oh and all those other nifty looking things in that bottom bar there, yeah it’s what you think. You can change the model color to one of these presets or even customize your own palette.
Plus for all you lovely people who want something a little more simplified to use as a pose reference
You can turn your model into the classic wire frame.
I’m tired of getting these stupid offers to work on people’s “passion projects” for free, usually with the promise of compensation when/if the project takes off. Guess what? I don’t care that you’re passionate about it, I care if you’re competent. When you knock on my door asking for free work, its a clear sign that you aren’t. You might have hopes that your project hits it big and that you’ll eventually get rich off of it, but if you REALLY believed in it, I feel like you’d be more willing to put your own livelihood on the line instead of asking an artist to do it for you. If I do a bunch of free work hoping it’ll pay off, I’m not doing other work that could actually feed me and pay my bills. And what happens when the project doesn’t get funded or some important factor blows up or everyone decides to quit out early? I get screwed. So, no. I don’t want to work on your passion project. Not unless I get paid up front.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, YOU GUYS! so stinkin’ excited to share my 2nd year film with y'all! much MUCH love to my beautiful CalArts family; I couldn’t have done any of this without you!
