Last time we had a look at how a character’s body type, personality, emotions and background-story influence posing and how to deal with weight and balance. This week you’ll learn a few guidelines to make your poses clear, readable and more appealing.
Animators from all over the world have long been complaining about the public’s misconception that animation is an easy and effortless process that can be done with the press of a button. Now, the impossible is becoming a little more real: The research department of the Walt Disney Company announced today that they are working on a suite of software which will be “a break-through in how animated features are created”.
Quickest way to improvement? Practice. It’s a simple bit of advice that rings with absolute truth. Articles, tips, mentors, and study will never get you as far as rolling up your sleeves and getting down to work, be it animation or any other skill. Today we’ve compiled a list of exercises, like animation push-ups, that will get your art skills buff and toned.
Last year we ran a series (found here) on ways to relax and keep away stress for animators. In Part 2 of the series we put out a call for YOUR best ideas and how you personally manage to keep cool when things get hectic! Today those ideas are being shared to all.
In my last eye article I stated that I was open for any questions about eyes in animation. And I got questions – a lot of them… Our reader Mahesh alone posted a ton of them and every single one would be worth an article. Now I’ll try to answer them, but I have to admit that I am probably not experienced enough to respond as confidently as I would like to for all of the questions. So I invite all of you to join the discussion and comment if you have any ideas or advice! Let’s get to it.
Eyes are the windows to the soul. There is nothing that can so drastically improve or destroy your animation than how well you direct your character’s eyes. Carefully animated eyes can really sell the impression that these lines or computer generated pixel have a living soul. On the other hand-side rushed imprecise work can destroy the believability of in other respects decent animation.
This article is about making the pupils of your characters properly looking at something or someone and avoiding mistakes that can happen when you align the eyes.
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The second half of our “Feet in Animation” series by Joshua Taback, including a downloadable PDF of the entire art tutorial at the bottom! Hot off the presses!
If you’ve studied or done animation for any length of time you’ve no doubt come across some absolutely fantastic storyboards out there. Single images that tell the story at hand with elegant brilliance yet wonderful simplicity. To create such pre-production masterpieces it takes a lot of skill and a huge amount of hard work and practice, of course, but there IS something you can do right now to make sure your storyboards really pop visually.
As a new year begins, many people make resolutions to better themselves. Animators are no different. Often we’ll take on new artistic goals and opportunities in order to refocus our creative efforts for a new calendar year. But while you’re writing your to-do list for 2013, there’s a very big pitfall that you’re going to want to avoid!
Last week we looked at a few ways to take some of the stress out of the very difficult job we have as animators, and today we’ll tackle a couple more! Check out these tips for taking the edge off, animation style.
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