Week 12

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

I don't think the ability to draw really affects the standard of a 2D animation as long as the animator can draw well enough to convey his message. The flow and timing of the movements are more important. However, the ability to draw well plays a part in creating an APPEALING 2D animation. Who wouldn't prefer better visuals when it comes to animation?

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

   No, I think that the ability to draw does not affect 3D animation, as long as the animator can visualise the object/character in his head, as 3D animation involves modeling rather than drawing. The animator builds an/a object/character using 3D blocks, without the need of drawing. However, being able to draw well can help in 3D animation if the animator sketches out the plan on paper first before starting to model.

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?

I feel that a good animation will be one that is more appealing than that of a poor animation. An animation has to appeal to its audience so that they will continue watching it. A good animation is also one that is convincing and realistic, more or less obeying the 12 principles of animation. The animation should also be interesting with climaxes and clear actions, instead of just dull and faint actions.

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 is very important for both, 2D and 3D animations. It relatively affects how I approach my animation. When doing 2D animaiton, there isn't a graph editor, hence, the planning of each frame is very important. When there is a mistake, it is time consuming to redraw the frames. However, when doing 3D animation, I can roughly place the object and keyframe it by estimation as the graph editor will allow me to freely adjust my animation curves.

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.
 
    To me, MAYA is a useful tool for 3D animation as it is well equiped with many functions. The time slider is easy to understand and allows animators to make changes easily at different keyframes. Personally, I find the graph editor extremely useful for me to smoothen my animation. It saves alot of time as I can place and keyframe the object by estimation to create a general motion, and then use the graph editor to adjust it properly afterwards. The playblast feature also allows me to  easily export my file as a video.