Tej Kohli: Books on Animation

Tej Kohli shares a collection of his most favourite books on 3D Animation.

Animating Real-Time Game Charactersby Paul Steed
The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression
by Gary Faigin
Horses and Other Animals in Motion
by Eadweard Muybridge
Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (Volumes 1-4)
by Eadweard Muybridge
Encyclopedia of Animation Techniques (Encyclopedia of Art Series)
The Animation : Master Handbook
by Jeff Paries
Character Animation in Depth
by Doug Kelly
3-D Human Modeling and Animation
by Peter Ratner, Pe Ratner
Effective Web Animation : Advanced Techniques for the Web
by J. Scott Hamlin
Animation 101
by Ernest Pintoff

Career in Animation

Animation gives various opportunity and roles in various industry. Indians who are seeking for a career in Animation is be good news that wings of Animation creator now expended into various field and its be new era phenomena for showing something new. The techniques for making new design also increased and now it’s embedding various media s for interacting real world. Animation is now limited only for making career in only software or even IT industry but films production , advertisement , television, the Internet, CD-ROM production, as well as product design/visualization, architecture, and interior design. Various roles and various departments in various have been made for recruiting animation professionals.
Different color Animation professionals

2-D Animator
Its be old fashioned but still exist because there are various area in which 2-D animation plays significant role and most important thing is that its be foundation of modern 3-D animation. 2-D animation professional can work animation, character design, clean-up, doping, modeling, slugging, and storyboarding.

3-D Animator
Various tools and software are in the market which plays significant role while designing and modeling character. 3-D animation gives the life of the charter. Now moving object just like real world people. Tools which help for making 3-D animation are PhotoShop, SoftImage, Alias/Wavefront, Maya, and others.s

Storyboard Artist
One of the challenging opportunity grown now are the days are Storyboard Artist. Basically these are the guys who interpret scripts to create storyboard. Work include are as planning shots, visualizing the story before drawing it, and being careful to maintain continuity among the shots. Storyboard Artist works many times as cutting, pasting, drawing, sketching perspective and composition. Story idea and screen play are the few part of role model that our Storyboard Artist plays many times .
Layout Artist
Layout Artist works for making the ideas for animation creation by rendering background layout for every scene. Basically they prefer Storyboard and other research for creating things. Such type of layouts are not in final production but

My Animation's Briefings

The first bit of worked asked of us was to draw a basic flickbook animation that shows the theme of Force
The first thing to enter my head was someone been hit with a ball!



I came across this cheetah running which is very impressive and may be able to use!

Here's a real cheetah running to compare the above animation to!

This is something that I may use in my final animation project!

For our final project we are to do a 30 second animation
here's a story board of my final project:

My 1st Maya Animation

After learning some of the basics in Maya Modeling and animation I set my self a little project and the whole thing took about 3 hours from start to finish. I decided to take this on mainly just to give myself a better understanding of how Maya works.

OK been working hard to get the animation for Maya underway!
Originally it was going to be between two dino's hatching and interacting but this may be a little complex given the time left to complete it in, so....
my fall back plan is to use a butterfly.
Here's the kind of work in progress!

Just about finnished on the Dino now. I say just about because I keep finding things that I need to do to him! I had a little play with some lighting in the second picture.

I had a little play around with posing him.

A ltttle further along now and I have my scene set and built the twin. I'm now ready for my 30 second animation.

My first attempt at a hatch but just a tad on the fast side!!!

I think this is a better version and but still a bit more tweaking is needed. It will do as part of the final animation!

The animation is just about complete now!
Just playing with the camera!

After a short disgussion with Jason (our Animation Tutor) I found that the animation project could have worked a little better if I'd given him a skeleton and animated the skeleton rather than the model!
I was a little confused as to what he meant by this?

After having been pointed out this site it became clear

www.simplymaya.com

as it contains a free down-loadable video tutorial on how to build a basic skeleton and also comes with the model of a dog so that you can follow it step by step!

Link below to the free tutorial
http://www.simplymaya.com/movie_pages/tutorial.mhtml?tut_id=36

Next I had to learn how to bind the skeleton to the model so that when the skeleton moves the model moves with it!
Although explained in the Tutorial I found that the function I was looking for was skinning.

Skinning just involves selecting your built model and skeleton and skin... this binds them together. I found this information on a forum after typing the question into google.

Now that I have completed the basic skeleton tutorial and learnt how to skin I feel that it's now time to put it into practice and do my own project!

The Inspiration

So with this in mind I decided that I'd have a go at either recreating this battle in 3D or a battle of their own!

Meet the models!

After finaly rigging a model for Megatron I decided that instead of giving him a full body skeleton I'd give him a partial skeleton so that parts of the body don't warp during movment
e.g. just aplying the skeleton to the hands legs and arms.