Digital 3D Potential and the Limitations 4: Environments

With digital 3D, environments are incredibly easy. A lot of the things you have to learn and practice drawing extensively can be done with a click of a button. Lighting and glowing objects in particular are extremely easy to create, and with the huge amount of settings and options. Drawing perspective no longer is an issue, as you make the objects and then move the camera around to get the perspective. Furthermore, texturing couldn't be easier. Maya has a few built in textures that can be overlayed on top of each other, and just like every other ability in Maya, there are no end of settings to make surfaces more or less reflective, more or less transparent, the possibilities are endless.

Digital 3D Potential and the Limitations 3: The skill set switch

With 2D animation, the ability to draw is definitely a necessity, (perhaps not so much for graphic animation) and an understanding of movement is also required, but with digital 3D the skill requirements seem to turn around.

With it being 3D animation, the drawing turns into sculpting, which, though is helpful to have some as a guide, doesn't require any drawing, though less tactile than working clay or over real world sculpting materials, the concept is still the same, mould until it looks like you want it. Then to animate with your 'sculpture' you need to rig, which is less artistic, and a lot more based in computer and programming logic as it isn't open as much to interpretation. There is a right way, and a lot of wrong ways to rig a model.

At this point you reach animating. I implied earlier that an understanding of movement is not required. This is a false statement, however with the graph editor, and using key frames, the whole process is much easier. If a movement doesn't look right its a simple matter of adding more or less keyframes, and playing around in the graph editor. This isn't better or worse than 2D animation, just different.

Digital 3D Potential and the Limitations 1: The uncanny valley

With the introduction of Digital 3D animation, we have slowly been able to animate to a more realistic level, however, this begins to have its own problems with the uncanny valley.

Originally the uncanny valley was conceptualised for robotics in the 70s by Masahiro Mori, a roboticist. The theory is, the more something is designed to be human, the higher the chance of it being creepy.

It began being applied to film after the release of Tin Toy by Pixar. The baby character is horrifying, and after huge negative reactions from viewers, the concept of the uncanny valley began being taken seriously in the film industry.

As technology has been developed to make more and more realistic models and movement for animation, the more animators have falling into the uncanny valley, usually because an aspect of real people has been overlooked (usually the eyes, as evident in games such as L.A. Noire, and films such as The Polar Express)

Digital 3D Potential and the Limitations 5: VIDEOGAMES

My personal favourite form of Digital animation is videogames. Not all videogames are 3D, but they are all digital, and even the simple ones often have an element of 3D in them. As a medium, videogames are huge, and the potential for storytelling is also huge, its a chance for the audience to become involved in the story, not just be an observer. It also opens up new avenues with storytelling, with different methods, for example, in open world games such as Fallout 3 or Skyrim, you can come and go as you please, the entire story can be changed by you and have maps 1000km by 1000km. This does mean a lot more work when animating, and a lot of limitations on texture quality and animation quality, just to fit it all onto one disk, but with the progression of hardware, quality of videogames are no longer limited by space as much.

Digital 3D Potential and the Limitations 2: Cost

With digital 3D animation, decent computer hardware is a must, particularly if the scene and/or characters are detailed, then the more intense it is going to be on your hardware. This can be quite expensive, with high end graphics cards being in the £400 area, for a machine that can render scenes quickly with minimal crashing you'd probably end up spending over £1000 on a decent rig. Compared to 2D animation which takes a lot less time to prepare and render, the hardware doesn't have to be as expensive.

Furthermore, most 3D animation program licenses are extremely expensive, for example a Maya license costs £3550, which is a lot more than your average pocket change. Luckily there are ways around this, such as blender, a free open source animation program which has all of the same capabilities as maya, though you would still need a decent computer to run it from.

Though the question of price is always an issue with most forms of animation, even pencils cost money, they certainly won't set you back as much as a brand new computer with maya.

Character and Narrative 13: Post Production and Audio

Now that we have animated, and finally finished rendering the animation, its time for post production. Katy has taken a leading roll for this part as she put the entire animation together, checked the timing, added a title and credits, and the underwater background, while i made the speech bubbles and added an animated filter to the underwater scene. After this we added our sound. Katy recorded some herself for the mermaid, and i found some computer sounds online for the robots speech (because the dial up noise i had already edited wasn't enough), I also had a look through the BBC sound library and the hanna barbera SFX collection that college has for ocean and underwater ambient noises, but Katy found some more appropriate sound effects online so we used those instead. This was by far the easiest section of this project, i could happily edit it all again. We did a final check with one of our peers, because we weren't sure about a certain sound bite at the end, which he approved of. Its nice to not be rendering on the day of submission again, our time management has been very good.

Character and Narrative:12 Animating

Today I got around to animating in maya using my model, my scene and Katy's model, and right now i am finding it thoroughly frustrating. Both models have so much wrong with them, luckily this isn't as much of a problem with my model because he doesn't move a whole lot, however Katy's model has a huge ammount of problems, i can't turn her character in certain directions because she hasn't painted the influence weights very well, furthermore, she showed me a shot that she had animated and it felt like she hadn't payed any attention to shot framing. I feel like at this point, the collaboration aspect of the project is what is causing me the most stress and anxiety, allowing the project to be in someone elses hands as well. In truth, the problems i have found with Katy's work i feel would probably be reciprocated when Katy works with my model as well. Otherwise animating is quite easy when the model is cooperating with you, some scenes of the animation are starting to look very nice.