Week 12

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

To be honest, one must be able to draw well to create a good 2D animation. Why? 2D animation is normally hand drawn, and they do really need to be at least appealing to attract viewers. A well drawn 2D animation can be really nice to watch, however a badly hand drawn but has a meaning in it can be also appealing to watch.

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

Nope! 3D animations are made by softwares like Maya. They do not require drawing at all, as everything is done from the computer. However, the person that is animating must have at least know how a good drawing looks like. What I meant was, imagine a guy that doesn't know what a good piece of art looks like, and he does animation. For example, he might be making a dog animation. He has the dog eyes placed at different parts of the body.

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?

A piece of good animation is an animation that is properly drawn and animated. Meaning that the lighting and the flow of the animation must be smooth. The animation should then be accompanied with a nice audio that suits the animation. A good animation allows it's audience to stay watch it throughout the whole video without feeling bored.
A bad piece of animation will be the opposite of what a good piece of animation will be like. Meaning that the flow of the animation isn't properly framed, the audio doesn't fit into the animation and audience get bored by watching it.

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.

Timing at a frame by frame level in 2D animation is important as we don't have a graph editor, but for 3D animation, there is a graph editor for us to edit the frames in between. This does not affect on how I approach my animation work because for 2D and 3D animation, I plan my frames carefully. The graph editor is only used if the animation turns out weird. The graph editor works as a backup so that we don't have to do the frames again.

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 great tool to use for animation, however if we newbies/beginners are new to Maya. Working with Maya can be tough. Tough in terms on finding the correct tools to use for animation. Sometimes, you can do your project halfway and because of all the shortcut keys and sometimes you tend to press the wrong button and some table might appear and you can't view your original project because of that new table popping out. Or another example would be, by moving the camera angle would be by pressing the ALT button. Sometimes I tend to press spacebar instead of ALT and ended up in another panel view. I had problems with changing it back last time as I was new to Maya. Now that I've used Maya more frequently, errors like that can be solved easily. However there are sometimes where you can't find the tool that you're looking for because of the number of functions and tools Maya has. It's really confusing when it comes to searching for tools.