No matter how awe-inspiring a lungfish's cakehole is, it's not going to help it move around on land.

[zustifer]

This animation school was lunk yesterday by mefi, and although I'd seen all the 2d stuff already, I thought to myself, Self, lettuce see how their 3d stuff looks, because kids doing their thesis are probably going to be inspirationally good at such an obviously good school. And thus I looked. And in close juxtaposition, the 3d stuff looked... dead. Something was wrong. And I think I have finally worked out what it is, and it's not even complicated. Minimal deformation (in the 2d sense of outline & mass distribution change) and squash/stretch. 3d models never deform nearly as much as their 2d counterparts. And yet, they're animated similarly otherwise, and sometimes the gestures are cranked way up to compensate for lack of form change. This looks in the end like a half-finished process, where stuff sure does move fancy (and OFTEN, GOD, every damn word has to have a hand-flail), but there's no overextension of limbs to wind up an extravagant gesture, there's no head squish in wacky takes. Damn it! And ALL THIS TIME, I thought I just sucked at 3d, because I couldn't make anything look good (in my favored style). I thought that Dreamworks was hiring the wrong people, or... I don't know. But it's all in the rig. In short, you can make it move the way you want, but you can't make it change shape the way you want. Unless you have a superfancy setup.

I believe Pixar has brought in some deformation to their characters, and CERTAINLY they have in Cars. This is probably why they made it, as proof of concept for mobile form-changin' characters. So that's why everything with a budget less than Pixar Feature Film still looks like Jimmy Neutron.

Now, of course, 'hyper-realistic' game anims shouldn't probably be able to do any of this, except... maybe a little.



* Title from the dinosaur mailing list I follow.

Comments

[diaryarena.livejournal.com]

I think the biggest problem with rigging is that you need to know a lot more of the math (or at least underlying programming complexity) to rig well. So people who are doing thesis projects in animation -- they can probably model really well with a working knowledge of subd surfaces or what it means to have tangent matching on surface joins or whatever, and they can probably texture well with a working knowledge of UV spanning, and they can probably animate well with a working knowledge of handedness and IK pole flipping...

but rigging is FUCKING INSANE compared to that stuff. I don't really know outside of Maya, but setting up custom UI for blend targets and stuff is a CINCH compared to the nitty-gritty of getting extreme deforms not tearing the geometry or distorting the textures, compared to the up-to-the-shoulder birthing of a flexible and expressive character.

And I really don't think people are teaching it; every project works better with a tech lead and I don't think people are ever tempted to take that role seriously unless they're coming in from the "I wrote my own raytracer" side of the scholastic divide.

It's kind of silly for me to go on this rant, though, considering my whole thing I've been practicing and moving toward is a sort of fake-stop-motion with rigid bodies and minimal deformation. But that's a stylistic thing, and I wouldn't even try to have a fleshy cartoon dude (or even his SKELETON) do a 30 frame walk without spending a week on his rig. (exaggerated for effect).

It's a shame, because the RENDERING side of things is finally reaching a point where you can hold a pose for almost a second and it's not going to look like the projector's stuck.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Also, animating straight ahead, as in stop motion, is definitely a different bag of treats. I personally way prefer it, and motion looks less dead and curve-based that way too. But no one will let me do that at jobs.

[diaryarena.livejournal.com]

It's 'cause auto-tweening goes against the whole idea of pose-to-pose animation! It's ridiculous.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Humm... kinda not, though, depending on your granularity of frames.

[diaryarena.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's just that, you know, fiddling with rotation keyframes and position keyframes and staggering them around, I'm much more likely to end up with blurry (blurred in the fourth dimension anyway) pose-less soup. But I don't storyboard (for no good reason), so it's my own fault.

Actually, I think the two styles take pretty much equal amounts of time to do WELL, so most people who use auto-tweening are clearly slacking off.

[druidbreeze.livejournal.com]

Heck, if you ever find ANYONE willing to pay for stop motion LP would be so jealous.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

There _are_ a couple of studios... but they're few and far between, and honestly I haven't animated puppets since college or shortly thereafter. So probably it wouldn't be so easy to snag a job. Sigh.