Week 12 Exercise 2 Questions

1) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 2D animation? Explain your view.
Partly yes. Being able to draw will make your characters and objects looks more realistic. However, animation is also about timing and movement. In other words, you must have both of the elements to make a good 2D animation. Either one is missing, and the animation will turn out bad.

2) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 3D animation? Explain your view.
Since we are using Maya, drawing would not be really an issue. Storyboarding does not require fantastic drawings, as long as the purpose and intention of the animation is known, then it served its purpose. Otherwise 3D animation would be the same as 2D animation: the model must look good in terms of appearances and movement.

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?
Sometimes there's no actual guidelines for judging an animation. Depending on the intended style of the animation, it might not always be extremely realistic. As long as it looks good to the style that we are expecting, then it will be good.

Some things like timings however will always be expected in our animation, such as ease-in and ease-out. Good timing naturally contributes to the quality of the animation, however, things such as physics and realism can be varied.

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.
It does not. It still require good timing on a frame-by-frame basis. While Maya helps us draw the arcs and curves, it is not always in the perfect shape that we want, thus we have weighted tangents in the graph editor.

Manipulating the curve still requires the awareness of timing at frame by frame. Sometimes, even though we have our keyframes/poses and our curves/arcs, we still find that the ball might be going way too slow at some areas and too fast at other areas.

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.
Maya allows easy creation of animation. Maya has frame interporation, allowing frame between keyframes to be generated automatically, and allow us to apply the ease-in-ease-out principle easily by using curves. This means that we do not have to do it frame by frame manually to adjust the object's transformation, which is a tedious job.

However, when dealing with complex animations, Maya tends to be more difficult to use, especially when adjusting the timings. Sometimes the time slider is not sufficient enough, and you have to use the graph editor, and even then, moving the frames through the graph editor is difficult because all the frames right behind what you are currently adjusting have to be moved as well, and also frames for other objects.