Release. Pressure. Animate.

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5. Stress testing the toolset The research on the different fields of animations and their workflow has given insight in different ways of working. One of the benefits I‟ve had because of this was that it made me think outside the box of only 3D animation and its workflow limitation. It has provided me with ideas and tools I would‟ve otherwise never come up with and would‟ve completely missed. Even more it gave me insight on how to combine, where to place and how to design the functionalities of the interface and technology for and in the toolset. Besides it has shown me techniques I had only heard of vaguely or heard of not at all. Within the previous chapter I‟ve developed guidelines for developing flow-enhancing tools and have presented numerous designs of concepts that are all developed on my findings throughout this thesis. For the development and usage testing of the presented guidelines and the concepts I‟ve been working on the animated short Mac „n‟ Cheese (2011). While doing the research in conjunction with the animation production I‟ve been developing the tools and started developing new concepts as well. Therefore some tools as discussed or mentioned in this chapter might seem different or in earlier stages. Also many concepts provided in the previous chapter have been developed on basis of my findings of the Mac „n‟ Cheese production, thus can be missing or lacking in-depth usage reports in this chapter. Nevertheless the creation of Mac „n‟ Cheese was a perfect opportunity to test out what I‟ve had in my mind in the past, improve and work on what I‟ve found out in the beginning of my research and test, use and further improve the significance, intuitivity and usefulness of such a toolset as designed. 5.1 The Mac ‘n’ Cheese (2011) production The creation of the animated short Mac „n‟ Cheese as part of this development has been great for my research and improved many thoughts and ideas for the tool development. Through production we‟ve had many setbacks and delays on things that could‟ve been way faster or easier and we‟ve discussed this throughout the project to improve on it as much as possible. Sometimes resulting in quick fixes, but often resulting in part of my research for future designs. For Mac „n‟ Cheese we used Autodesk Maya 2011 as 3D production package. On a daily basis it felt that Maya‟s standard design slowed us down. Maya‟s tasksplosions 29 often led us into frustrating moments doing some simple tasks over and over again and thus taking too much time. At first I thought that speeding up or working around just these little annoyances would provide a significant improvement by itself. And by discussing daily on what (part 29 Tasksplosion; The unexpected and natural process whereby a simple, single task requires you to complete a whole set of tasks, some of them unrelated to the one at hand. 5. Stress testing the toolset 1 3 2
of the animating) could need this type of speed improvement resulted in me doing a quick „button‟ for the animator to release most of the overhead of a task. Ending up with buttons for just those specific tasks did relieve some pressure on our brains and often for just a day or two we would feel less task saturated 30 . Though, often when the specific task was completed it was not being used anymore (because of its specific function on parts that only occurred that once or twice.) The functions were not helping our overall animation process and the row of buttons was quickly getting to feel less useful. Within the production of Mac „n‟ Cheese I came across a single thing that annoyed me very much which I needed to do over and over again. It‟s the setting of the selection masks to only curves. Image depicting the difference in efficiency with the enhancement for the selection mask menu. This is one of the default top row buttons of Maya (multiplied by three) that sets the currently active selection mask. When everything is enabled you‟re able to select everything in the scene and when nothing is selected you are unable to select anything. By default when you change scene in Maya or close it down and open it again it resets back to its default. As an animator you almost always want to only select curves. Thus you needed to deselect all the buttons except for one, 7 clicks, or press right mouse button and select the „deselect all‟ option from the menu and then click the one you need; 2 clicks. It was annoying to do this every time. I changed the script in Maya that was linked to the buttons; my fix: allow control + click to focus on a single one instantly. This was in the end one of the most used changes I‟ve made while in the production of Mac „n‟ Cheese. This change taught me how much influence the slightest changes can have. Noticing this helped me finding the way towards better tools and made me starting to define the basic guidelines for flow-enhancing tools production as part of my research. For Mac „n‟ Cheese I started by creating an autorigger that could help the character setup stage, I‟d started creating and designing it even before production of Mac „n‟ Cheese started. I had done research towards animator friendly rigs and had already reviewed other popular rigs with the team members beforehand to get a clear idea of what we wanted. Later when development of the story for Mac „n‟ Cheese started I already had a structured system for developing the rig, but pretty early on – while discussing the story and action of the film – it came to my attention that the rig needed more and easier controls. We needed many complex features in the rig, like stretchiness, 30 Task saturated: Complete shutdown while multi-tasking, often resulting in catastrophe. 5. Stress testing the toolset 1 3 3
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PRESSURE. RELEASE. ANIMATE. How to
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“Art challenges technology. Techn
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Table of Contents Table of Contents
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Introduction Not a very long time a
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This is all evolving around the mai
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There are two difficulties in discu
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1.2 How can a flow be maintained or
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this piece of art - posing the char
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You know that feeling when you watc
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without any reference or sketching.
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2.1 Animating like a puppeteer. (St
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ond with the character often create
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everything done smoothly at the mom
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same, hence a „tick‟ of the lig
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This paragraph is about what in gen
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“Too much action spoils the actin
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working clean and keeping your head
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think in the ways of those strong p
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the motion and action of the charac
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this can be a reliable way for „i
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It‟s hard to have a clear distinc
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the background. Any distraction at
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or the mixed approach as described
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customizing and tweaking the whole
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as the character parts don‟t actu
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As with traditional animation and m
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example you could divide the pipeli
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ecognizable style on its own, but f
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issue. “While early production mo
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There‟s a need for a strict goal
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Simplicity is what animators seem t
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Simple thinking Complex effects Ful
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creating a thorough plan that doesn
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Because using the early computer sy
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work you‟re looking at, regardles
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we‟ll see. According to a job des
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day polishing splines, arcs and spa
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It‟s important to allow supervisi
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doesn‟t. For him they were mainly
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- Discuss with supervisor. - Animat
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the animator (like reviews by the s
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By now I‟ve presented the importa
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the final movie too. They might see
Page 87 and 88: progression of the shot before star
Page 89 and 90: In management I‟ve noticed while
Page 91 and 92: already know exactly what pose happ
Page 93 and 94: (Autodesk Whitepaper - The New Art
Page 95 and 96: with a limited amount of informatio
Page 97 and 98: information to be (possibly) presen
Page 99 and 100: for. Sometimes it is necessary to a
Page 101 and 102: pop out is simplicity. For every ta
Page 103 and 104: goals (based off of storyboard and
Page 105 and 106: up and shut it down instead of a co
Page 107 and 108: development 22 . Since the tracking
Page 109 and 110: The same accounts for playing the a
Page 111 and 112: animation studios, and if it were u
Page 113 and 114: on it, as well as use it automatica
Page 115 and 116: offer functionality for this in a r
Page 117 and 118: guessing right away what the best t
Page 119 and 120: to focus on only these parts and ma
Page 121 and 122: een developed through the years for
Page 123 and 124: data to handle through the years se
Page 125 and 126: applying it to your objects animati
Page 127 and 128: allows you to quickly sculpt tweaks
Page 129 and 130: quickly and easily check your anima
Page 131 and 132: without worrying about what and whe
Page 133 and 134: viewing and commenting accordingly
Page 135 and 136: stimulation might interfere with ac
Page 137: A picture depicting an overview of
Page 141 and 142: tools that really helped with the c
Page 143 and 144: never really ended up using it as f
Page 145 and 146: But looking at the character from t
Page 147 and 148: otate around his head took me at mo
Page 149 and 150: As stated we worked faster and were
Page 151 and 152: Conclusion The main focus of my res
Page 153 and 154: management, start using it and twea
Page 155 and 156: Reference Sources Animation Mentor
Page 157 and 158: Hoffman, Hans; T. Weeks, Sara; H. H
Page 159 and 160: 1. Workflow and Pipeline clarificat
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Release. Pressure. Animate.

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