LipSynching Characters
Synchronizing the lip movements of a character to match the words of a recorded voice track is called lip synching. Lip-synching a character is a lot like choreographing, but on a smaller scale. In fact, motion capture systems are designed for capturing facial and lip movements of an actor in real time. In the same way that live motion capture is not used unless the project is for a regular, repetitive, or large project, lip synching by hand is preferred by most animators who only require the...
Lighting Effects
Another form of shadow effect is a gobo. This term comes from the film industry and refers to a piece of metal or cardboard placed over a directional lighting source with holes cut in it to form a light pattern. Some gobos have horizontal slots to imitate light from a Venetian blind, whereas others have leaf-shaped holes to simulate forest lighting. Many animation programs offer gobos or shadow masks, which enable the artist to use a picture file for instance, a JPEG drawing of black and white...
Building a Render Farm
This book is designed to take you from having no knowledge of animation to the stage where you are ready to open and successfully run your own animation studio. During this journey, you may not have much of an opportunity to work with mass-production hardware, but I urge you to use whatever opportunity may come your way to gain experience in computer maintenance and network management. Get to Know Computer Hardware Typically, when you start your own studio, you will be working alone with one...
Research Methods You Can Use
You can certainly use my methods to do your own prepurchase evaluations. If you want to find out the best products in a particular area, explore the topic on your favorite search engine mine is Coppernic at www. copernic.com and then examine the web sites of each company you discover. Although I would not recommend you impersonating a member of the press, you can and should contact the company's investor relations office, requesting the appropriate annual reports and Form 10K a more complete...
The Workflow Process
Regardless of the type of animation you are contemplating, its complexity, audience, deadline, or budget, the same general workflow takes place and the same eight steps apply. Keep in mind that not all steps are required for every project and that, unless you are a studio owner, you may not be required to execute all the steps in your specific job category. 1. Pitching the project Chapter 1 2. Contracting and billing Chapter 1 3. Storyboard Chapter 2, From Concept to Screen The Workflow Process...
Splines
After several years of working with polygons during which a billion or so flying logos and other animations were made, based on boxes , the designers of animation programs began to look for other ways to define surfaces and model objects. Realizing the shortcomings of polygonal modeling, the designers searched for a way of defining surfaces with mathematically defined curves. In this process, the designers realized that the computer used polygons to define specific sets of points in 3-D space....
Electronic Pen Devices
A popular though not strictly necessary tool in animation is a device called an electronic pen. Electronic pens enable you to substitute your mouse for a pen device. You use the pen just like any pen, pencil, or brush, depending on the software and how you set the defaults. Obviously, if you come from a traditional art background or if maybe you think the mouse was never designed to, well, draw , a pen device is a lot easier to use than a mouse. Electronic pens come in two basic types. The ones...
The Massing Model
Prior to doing any specific modeling, you may want to consider the advantages of building a quick massing model see Figure 7-8 . A massing model is usually composed of simple components boxes, spheres, and cylinders and is placed in a scene to figure out the elemental basics of the animation you envision. These basics might be related to a specific storyboard, allowing you to see how the character would fit in each scene and if the storyboard works in the 3-D world. Often, a storyboard artist,...
Cutting Corners
It wouldn't be responsible of me in this post 9 11 era of tight budgets to prance around with the best and latest brands of hardware, knowing some of you out there are scraping your last dollars together to get into animation. The computers I've recommended here are clearly the pinnacles of the trade, and although you should aspire to own one, you may only be able to squeak into the business with something you cobble together from an Enron auction or from your parents' largess. I feel your...
Cabling
One should not discount the importance of the cabling that connects the various elements of your desktop system. Obtain the best cables you can afford and always treat a cable with great care. When budgeting for your studio, don't forget to set aside adequate funds for quality cables and connectors. The cables are your most essential component and are frequently the source of the most difficult problems. If you are experienced with soldering and are meticulous in your work, you can buy both...
Computer Workstations
In response to the question about what brands I'd recommend, here are some of those products that were used as the test bed for this book. Compaq HP Often the acquisition of one great company by another results in a dilution of the brand, if not the qualities that made both companies great. Not so with this recent merger, or should I say, series of mergers under HP CEO Carly Fiorina. The guts of the best HP animation computers go back several years to the innovative microprocessor engineering...
TimeSaving Tip 1
Front- and rear-projected image maps are useful for quickly creating complex scenes. Imagine that you have a scene in which the camera will move very little or not at all. In this scene, you want to place a complex character that will take time to animate. You don't have time to render the entire background scene, so instead you project a photographic image. As long as the camera doesn't move too much, your rear-projected image can appear to be a full-developed 3-D environment an office,...
The Recording Booth
A small recording booth is useful for recording the voices of animated characters, narrators, and, to a limited degree, simple music such as a guitar, harmonica, or drum. Although you may want to use a full-blown professional recording studio for commercial-level work, a simple, in-house recording facility can be useful for recording scratch tracks and for experimenting with various audio alternatives before you commit yourself to hours of laborious animation work. The recording booth can be a...
LOD and Parametric Modeling
Parametric modeling is an advancement of an important characteristic of subdivision surfaces and patch modeling. As you know, the level of detail in a character is based on the density of data that composes that character. Just as the density of pixels determines the resolution of a 2-D photo, the density of polygons, spline curves, and CVs determines the resolution of a character's surface and detail. Obviously, the closer you get to a character, the more resolution becomes an issue. A...
ADR Software
If you are already using Pro Tools, you can get a plug-in from Gallery Software called ADR Studio www.demon.co.uk gallery . This innovative software offers all the tools necessary for adding high-quality recordings onto a preexisting track see Figure 3-19 . A montage of screens from ADR Studio, software that turns your Pro Tools system into a voice-looping studio. Very effective for post-synching animation. A montage of screens from ADR Studio, software that turns your Pro Tools system into a...
Object Manipulation
Objects that can be manipulated in LightWave include 3-D objects and elements, bones, lights, and the camera only one camera object is permitted in any LightWave scene . Object navigation tools are found under the Items tab in LightWave. These include Move, Rotate, Size, Stretch, Squash, and Numeric, all of which can be selected by clicking on named buttons when the Items menu is displayed see Figure 4-5 . With other menus displayed, the tools can be accessed by keystrokes shortcut keys are...
One Mans Story
My mother is a traditional woman who grew up during the Great Depression. People like that always tell their children to get a good full-time job with a pension and good health benefits. If they're like my mother, they add on things like And find a nice girl, get married, settle down, have kids, and buy a nice house with a white picket fence. My mother would always suggest I go up the road from my house to a company called Squibb in Princeton, New Jersey. Even back then, before it merged with...
Case Study
I recently had to supervise the creation of a cartoon lion character that would be featured in a series of used-car commercials. The client was extremely picky and our first 10 sketches went nowhere. We'd try one thing and the client would say the opposite. We'd develop the opposite and the client still wasn't happy. Eventually, we gave up drawing completely and went searching in Google for lion and limited the search to graphics. We then created over 100 lion sketches and sent them all to the...
The Element Breakdown
Heath Vincent, the intern who came to us from Full Sail, showed me an exercise that he did for his professors. The exercise was to simply list the concept statements of an animation he was planning. You can do this really simply or you can get elaborate and make it look like a corporate organization chart, but either way, it's good procedure. Have a look at Heath's concept statement in Figure 2-3. The next step in the element breakdown is to make a story summary. Again, keeping it simple, write...
Layers Vlx
Additional view options can be selected from a group of seven Quick Layout buttons arranged in the lower half of the row of icons on the left of the scene window see Figure 4-28 . The first six of these buttons are tiny replications of how the interface will look when you press them. From top to bottom, these buttons are as follows Classic quad view see Figure 4-29 Vertical split screen between the outliner and a perspective view Horizontal split screen between a perspective view and the Curve...
General Description 1
Discreet's 3ds max presents all of its modeling and layout functions in one user interface UI . When starting, the animator boots to a default UI, but he or she may choose to customize the UI or select one of several configurations using the Layout tab. 3ds max's controls are iconic, which means that buttons are icons that represent their functions. If you park your mouse on an icon for a few seconds, the name of that button appears on the screen, making it easy to learn what the icons mean....
Dividing up the Work
In large animation shops, each bit of work can be divided among many animators. For Titanic, one junior animator got to design and place hundreds of rivets. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a team of animators were assigned to capture the motion of one actor to provide action for the animated character, Golem. Chances are, if you're going to run your own animation studio, however, you will have to wear many hats and divide a large variety of assignments to just a few workers. Such is the case...
Photon Mapping
Photon mapping is a technique that takes two passes to calculate the lighting solution for each scene. The first pass employs a mathematical emulation of photons, which in the real world are the theoretical representation of a light's mass. In the computer animation realm, by using the properties of particles and emitting them as representations of energy from each light source in the scene, we are able to emulate photons. The result of this emission is a photon map. A second pass of...
Writing and Approving the Script
Writing a script for a client can always be a tricky endeavor. Although clients trust an animator with a wide latitude of freedom in the graphics department, they tend to compensate when it comes to the script. This is because most clients, at least industrial clients outside Hollywood or the major market networks, have no idea what goes into the making of an animation, but everyone knows or thinks they know how to write a good English sentence. Writing a good English sentence, by the way, has...
Function Curves
After you have test-rendered your character animation, the results might not be what you expected. My experience with novice animators and not-so-novice clients and producers is that any initial attempts to create smooth movement using keyframes often result in unaesthetic cornering. In other words, you may want a smooth sweep of a hand from point A to point C, with the midpoint at point B. Instead of a smooth continuous flow from A through C, you get a noticeable effect at point B, which...
Sliders
Many animation programs enable you to finish off the rigging of a character by assigning any of the various channel controls to a graphical slider see Figure 7-14 . Therefore, instead of moving the leg gnomon up and down, for instance, you can move a slider named right leg. By combining these controls into one slider, you can build fairly complex combinations A character face in 3ds max rigged to a set of sliders shown in columns to the left and right of the model that control various...
Nonuniform Rational Bspline NURBS Modeling
Olaf had the same problem you do if you use Beziers and B-splines, because these kinds of splines cannot be cut at any point in the curve and then easily pasted into another curve. Creating complex objects such as the ears of a donkey or the wings of a dragon would be difficult using splines that could not be cut and pasted at will see Figure 5-10 . Although the reasons for this limitation are too technical for this book, you may be happy to know that a further development in curves came with a...
Light Properties
Different types of lights have different properties, nearly all of which can be keyframed. It is important to note that changing a light's properties during an animation requires the computer to recalculate all the parameters of that light throughout the scene for every frame in which a change of properties occurs. For example, let's say you are creating an animation in which the sun is rising. This can be accomplished by changing the color, position, and intensity of the sunlight during the...
Object Creation Vbr
Under the Create menu, Maya provides four categories of primitive shapes NURBS or Nonuniform Rational B-spline , Polygons, Subdivision Surface, and Volume see Figure 4-36 . Within each category is an assortment of standard shapes. Clicking the name of the shape produces a default-sized object of that type at the zero point of the x-, y-, and z-axes, known in Maya as the origin. In order to customize the object before it is created, click the box to the right of the name of the object. This...
Polygon Modeling
We ll begin by describing polygon modeling and proceed to other methods. Each of the three animation programs in this book have different ways of offering users the various methods of modeling. Some programs, such as LightWave, handle the various modeling methods differently. Although specific differences will not be covered in detail in this book, you are encouraged to explore them in the tutorials provided by each manufacturer on the free CD. Simple objects, such as spheres and cones, are...