Getting from Concept to Animation



You make and animate characters in the following interrelated and often interwoven stages:

  • Scriptwriting, deciding what your character will do.
  • Thumbnailing, deciding how your character will look.
  • Drawing, deciding how the details of your character will look.
  • Modeling, creating geometry for characters, props, and backgrounds.
  • Texturing, creating materials for your character and scenes.
  • Setup, wrapping geometry around bones and other deformers (sometimes called enveloping).
  • Layout, arranging characters in your view.
  • Animating, making your characters move. (Layout is often combined with this phase.)
  • Lighting, making your animations visible for the camera.
  • Rendering, taking moving pictures or "filming" the animation you've created.
  • Post-process, sequencing rendered frames with sound, compositing, editing, and output to tape.
As you can see, the procedure is extended, and almost everybody who creates 3D animation follows it to some extent. Game, motion graphic, commercial advertising, animation broadcast

video, and feature film studios all use this methodology to varying degrees. But these are
examples of team-based production; individual animation producers/directors, such as those
trying to produce an animation for use on their demo reels, are responsible for each phase
themselves. Spending too much time on any one phase or group of phases can be fatal to the
entire process. As an animator, I tend to focus on getting to the animation phase as quickly
as possible, while still having an appealing and easy-to-animate character. My goal in this
chapter is to show you how to speed up these early phases of the CG (computer graphics)
animation process.
Becoming skilled at computer animation involves negotiating the dichotomy of learning
the technical processes of the discipline while attempting to master the art forms of quality
character animation. Complicating this process is the complexity of character animation
itself, the enormity of Maya (or other high-end 3D packages) as a piece of software, and the
time constraints inherent in any animation project. Nobody has an unlimited amount of time
for work (and making peace with that fact is a superb first lesson), so operating within a
given amount of time is an inevitable constraint. Coming to grips with the limited resource
of time and comparing it with the enormous volume of work involved makes you realize
how daunting the challenge of creating quality CG animation really is—especially in a solo
or small group project!

"It's [baseball] supposed to be hard. I fit wasn't bard, everyone would do it. The
'hard' is what makes it great."—}immy Dugan (Tom Hanks) in A League of
Their Own

Computer animation is like baseball, but with the added difficulty of being perceived
as easy to accomplish. Unfortunately, the rah-rah making of documentaries, feature-laden
advertisements, and skilled demonstrations by power-using industry professionals does nothing
to dispel this idea. These facts, coupled with the intrinsic coolness of creating animated
creatures and worlds, have lead thousands of individuals to try their hand at animation.
Lured by obsolete tales of Hollywood discovering, hiring, and training people off the street
and egged on by the desire to see their creations come to life, people often work diligently to
learn the software but then become puzzled and, in some cases, discouraged when their skills
are not marketable at their desired employment level. This is especially true of character animation.
Character animation is hard, and that "hard" truly does make it great! If it were
easy, everybody would do it well.
Animating well requires that you focus on what you want to accomplish as precisely as
possible before sitting down at the computer. The first three phases of the animation process—
scriptwriting, thumbnailing, and drawing—are often called preproduction. They are
key because you have precious little time to complete an animation, and the planning, far
from increasing production time, actually shortens it.

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