Creating a 3D animation requires sufficient disk space, understanding of software and keyframing, and consideration of target display. Organic motion follows arcs and involves small movements from other parts of the model. Professional animations are created by teams, and rendering can take a long time.
When creating a 3D animation, there are several factors to consider before you begin. The first is to ensure that there is sufficient disk space to create, render and store files, as a 3D animation can take up a large amount of space. Second, it’s important to know and understand how animation, modeling, and rendering software works, as well as how it syncs with external applications like image editors. Animating primitive shapes like bouncing cubes or spheres might seem easy, but it’s important to understand the concepts of skinning, rigging, and keyframing for more complex mesh objects like human characters. You can save time deciding what your target display will be, because this will help determine the aspect ratio for rendering, the number of frames per second needed, and in some cases, the file format that should be used for the final product.
Understanding how and why a 3D animation program or suite works is critical to creating good animation. With an incomplete understanding, incredibly useful features may not be used or unpredictable results, such as disappearing textures, may occur without explanation. Knowing how an animation program interacts with other applications, such as modelers, video encoders, and renderers, is also important, because it may mean limiting the use of features that may not transfer to other programs.
When working with any type of 3D animation software, it’s important to understand how keyframes work within the program, because they are the basis of most animations. In addition to keyframes, a key thing to study is how to properly construct a mesh so that it can be maneuvered when rigged with a skeleton without warping the mesh undesirably. This usually involves using as few polygons as possible in the model or taking the time to properly weight each vertex through trial and error. The same concept applies to creating textures that will be applied, or skins, on the model.
If your 3D animation uses moving characters, it can be helpful to understand a few tricks to make the movement look organic. In general, organic motion follows arcs; it almost never follows a straight line. Movement of a single part of a model should trigger some small movement from other parts of the model, such as a human head turning to one side, causing the shoulder and torso to move slightly in the process. It can also be helpful to create a library of motions for a given skeleton so they can be edited or reused without having to rebuild the entire sequence for what may be only a minor difference.
When making 3D animation, it’s important to understand that most professional animations are actually created by teams of animators, and every small business is handled by a single person skilled in that area. In a short animation, a single character can have up to 10 people working on that character alone, each doing a different task such as movement, keyframing, textures, and mesh modeling. It can take a long time to create even a short 3D animation, so patience is vital.
Once the 3D animation is complete, it usually needs to be rendered frame-by-frame to some specification and then compressed into a viewable media format. An animation that lasts just one minute may require 1,800 individual frames to be rendered. Depending on the quality of the render, each frame could take an hour or more to render, meaning that a high quality and complex one minute long animation could take 75 days to render. To avoid unexpected render times, you should monitor the render rate of a frame and, if necessary, edit the scene to make it shorter if it gets too long.
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