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Animation: The Art of Cheating
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Location: Blogs Fringe Theories |
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| Posted by: jdouglas |
7/9/2006 |
Disclaimer:
I promised an entry about rigged character animation, but when I sat down to write it I ran into a problem... It's too complicated to explain in simple text. So, I ended up posting a short video showing you all the stuff I'm about to try to explain in this blog... enjoy!
First of all let me put to rest the myth that you have to hand-draw every frame of cell animation to get authentic (or even good looking) output. To get perspective, each second of animation is composed of roughly 24 frames of images. That means 1440 images for each minute, or 129,600 frames in a standard ninety-minute Disney film.
Now, let's pretend your best friend can draw, ink, and paint each individual frame in roughly an hour. That means that if your friend worked full-time on that type of animation, it would only take him 62 years to complete an hour and half film.
So, how does anyone actually get all that animating done.... They cheat. Ok, some people call that 'being efficient,' but in the end it's plan old cheating. And here's one great way to cheat!
Character Rigging:
Most animation software is built with controls that allow you to 'rig' your characters. Rigging is the process of creating a puppet-like version of your character, so that you can simply manipulate it like a doll. And best part is you can use the same puppet-version of your character over and over again!
To rig a character in most programs:
1. Draw a master character sketch.
2. Divide the sketch into individual parts that will move separately (i.e. each finger, the palm of the hand, the forearm, the upper arm, etc)
3. Ink and fill each layer so that the layers look correct both at their starting positions as well as throughout their range of motion.
4. Determine each layer's Parent/Child relationship in the hierarchy (i.e. the fingers are all children of the hand, the hand is a child of the forearm, etc)
5. Test out your ranges of motion to make sure you have all of your layers inked and linked correctly.
After you have created a rigged character you can easily create animations by manipulating these layers across a timeline with keyframe. And when you get ready to output your animated movie, the software will create all those time-consuming frames in between the keyframes you positioned.
Just like having your friend draw each frame -- but much, much faster!
We are using Toon Boom v3 to do all of our character animations, and the video below will give you a very quick look at the basic ideas of using a rigged character.
 
* This video is 1:30, so it might take some time to load.
All Characters property of Theoretical Games from the video game My Bōgle.
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