There are, however, some programs that are more widely used in the industry, and if you were to look for work in a studio or company, it would benefit you to learn one of these programs.
To an extent, it doesn’t really matter what software you use, as you alone determine the quality of your work, but each 3D animation software employs a workflow that may suit the needs of a particular kind of user. Now that you have a basic idea of what you’re going to need to study, it’s time to find out which software will suit you. This involves tweaking your colors, augmenting your lighting, and later on, adjusting each aspect of your final images by rendering in passes, which are essentially elements that constitute your final outputs when put together. In this final stage, you’ll be cutting up your scenes and rearranging them in a way that would best fit your story, as well as adjusting various elements of your rendered outputs to enhance their visual appeal. This involves a balancing act between speedy calculation and quality.
Here is where you tell your software to convert your 3D data into a 2D image or movie output. The penultimate stage of your 3D animations. AnimationĪt this point, you would pose your rigged characters on certain frames, keeping in mind certain animation principles to breathe an illusion of life into them. Once you’ve got your characters ready, you’ll need to be able to control them, like you would a puppet, by creating a system of “bones” that allows you to pose your characters. The way you arrange your scene’s elements is also important because this influences whether the viewers are looking at what they need to be looking at and whether everything pans out in a visually-pleasing way. You’d need to know how lights are configured for various purposes and recreate that setup on your virtual stage Layout Much like a film maker in the real world, you’ll want to use the lights in your scene to create a mood for your story and highlight details that contribute to the way viewers will perceive your characters and the places they’re in. If you have a scene with a tree stump for example, you would probably create a cylinder, then add a material on it with the surface properties of a tree bark (how it reacts to light, it’s color, the bumps and creases on its surface, etc.).
Once you’ve managed to create these elements, you’ll need to learn how to use your 3D software’s repository of materials to give your objects the surface characteristics they need and use images to influence some of these characteristics. You can’t animate anything you haven’t made yet, so you’ll need some understanding on how to manipulate 3D objects to create the elements you’ll need for your animation. Sketch out a rough story board, model sheets for your characters, sets and props, and render out some stills that depict the look and feel of your movie. If you’re planning to create an animated short by yourself, you’ll need to know what goes into it.īefore you get bogged down by the technical aspects of 3D work, you’ll need to get your ideas mapped out in a structured way, allowing yourself to start production knowing you’ll have your story, visual treatment, and the rest of the big picture planned out. The term 3D animation is still used to describe the totality of 3D content creation, but you’ll find that creating an animated sequence follows a pipeline that involves skills you probably wouldn’t have thought you’d need to develop, and actually animating something in 3D is only one of those skills.