Week12

Finally Animation.....

Finally i get to try out some animations on maya. I find it very fun and challenging but i don't really like the part where i have to adjust the graphs and render settings, kinda confusing and hard to do.

Exercise 1-Bounce Ball

Exercise 2

1) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 2D animation? Explain your view.
To me, one must be good at drawing if the person wants to create 2D animations, this is because the drawings are like the footages of an animation, it totally rely alot on it to produce good animations. It might not be hand-drawn, but sometimes may be created using graphical programs or edited.

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

As for 3D, you need not be good in drawing as 3D objects can be create by using basic polygons and edited using vertices and other components.



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?

A piece of bad animation is when the audience don't understand the story, doesn't look satisfying. And with all this weak point, it will sure affects the audience's impression on the animator.

A good piece of animation is when the whole animation look realistic. With good audio companion and animation principle added in it. A good story line plays a part too and that's when storyboarding comes in.

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.

Personally, i felt that it's different. In 3D, yes we can adjust the speed of the whole animation by the frame. Using graph editor to edit the the flow of animation, but we still got other components we have to consider, like the camera angle, lightings, different views. But for 2D, we don't have to worry about that, it's all 2 dimensional based, very straight forward.

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 Previously used Maya to model object, didn't get to use the animation part. My first assignment for using Maya to do animation is to create an animation of a ball bouncing over a fence. It was easy but kinda confusing. It was adding in squash and stretch. Here comes the tedious part, to get the flow of the whole animation of squash and stretch. 

To conclude it up, i felt that the placement of the animation tools is kind of messy. Instructions was not clear enough, too complicated. As a first timer, i find it rather confusing and hard to follow