WEEK 12:EXERCISE 2

From your (still very) basic experience with 2D and 3D animation, discuss the following questions on your weblog.

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

Yes, this is mainly because 2D drawing depend mostly on the image, which in this case, has to be hand drawn. 

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

  We do not really need to be able to draw to create a good 3D animation. This is because in 3D animation, the object that is animated depends mainly on your understanding of the object, and it relies on your imagination.

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?

The timing has to be perfect. For example, the exercise with the crane and the boxes, if the crane's position is already at the position where it is supposed to pick up the box, and the box is not there yet, then it would seem like the crane is picking up nothing.

Also, the movements must be exaggerated to show the viewers what is really happening. For example, if the crane picks up the box quickly and puts it down quickly within a period of maybe 2 seconds, the viewers would not be able to see the whole animation.

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.

The graph is more important in manipulating the rates of change over time. This is because, in the graph you can easily fine-tune each detail, like the angle of the bounce, and time. 

This does affect my animation work, and it allows me to perfect my work, as i can adjust each an every point on the graph. Therefore, before i playblast my video, i can check the graph, to ensure that there aren't any stray points. 

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 is a programme that allows users to model their own objects, and also animate it afterwards. Maya does make animation easier as it has some basic features that allows users who are still new to the programme to be able to learn easily and use it. 

However, there are several extra features, that need alot of work to complete. For example for the crane and the box,  I had to create parent, constrain, skeleton and do alot of other work. I found it very time constraining, and complicated.