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View Full Version : Making of a CG/3D animated short

Ank4
08-30-2007, 07:54 PM
(If this thread is in the wrong section of the forum, please redirect)
I turned to CGTalk for this as most people here are more familiar with this kind of things than I am, so here it goes:

Me and my friend are 18 years old, studying last year in the Technical programme at a swedish school. As it's the last year, we have to work with a special project, where we concentrate on a subject connected to technology, for around 100 hours. So we thought about doing an 3d animated short. We're not going to have any voice acting, just a simple storyline with a mute character, pretty simple rendering, not exactly Shrek-quality.
We have worked with 3d software a whole lot, so we are very comfortable in modelling, making effects, a little bit of rigging, but we've only tried animating a few times, and we haven't done anything serious yet.

For those who have worked with something similar; Is it a good idea to start on something like this, when we have practically no experience in 3d Animation(some experience in 2d animating)?
We're aiming for around 2-4 minutes of animation, is this possible within 100 hours with only 2 people, including a bit of learning to animate?
We can of course stretch the time how much as we like to, as we are able to work with the project after hours as well, but is 2-4 minutes of film within reach for us, or should we just think of doing something else?

If you do think that this is possible, do you have any tips for working with this professionally, making a storyline, dividing up tasks between 2 people, etc?
If you know a good tutorial of animating(not that we're not going to search ourselves) that you want to share, post it.
Also, if you have been in the same situation before and have done a short movie, it would have been really helpful if you showed us, so we could see how much we can accomplish.

Then of course, if you think this isn't possible at all, I'd be grateful if you suggested a project that we actually could do!

I appreciate any kinds of replies, so don't be afraid to post!
/Anders
jjdon
09-07-2007, 09:12 PM
Hello - I feel kind of foolish replying, because I'm not an animator at all, but nobody has replied to this in quite awhile..... I've seen this same sort of question several times on www.highend3d.com (http://www.highend3d.com) - seems a max of 5 seconds a week is what they say, for 1 person. Anyway, the real message is that maybe you should pose the question there, since there seems to be no reply here - try one of the Maya boards. Hope I'm not breaking rules by referring, I don't think so....
Rangerman
09-08-2007, 04:54 AM
Could you give us an idea to what your animation will look like so that we could visualized what you might be facing? I'm new to character animation myself and my first animation project has taken me an enormous amount of time to storyboard, draw concept art of the characters, model, rig, texture, and then animating the characters. I guess you should look at your current skills whether it be in learning, modeling, rigging, animating, or whatever, and then determine what you think is practical for you two to accomplish within 100 hours or less.
Ank4
09-08-2007, 09:39 AM
Haha, finally someone had the guts to say something.
Well, we're thinking of having some kind of cel-shaded rendering(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel-shaded_animation), so both the modelling and animation will lean towards something cartoonish. That will hopefully result in more time of animating as the models don't have to be as detailed as they would have been if we did a more serious movie, visually.
I want the movie itself to be a bunch of short clips with a character trying to do different kinds of things, but fails all the time(comedy). But it could also be some sort of commercial for something, or just for informing about .e.g our school or technology.

5 seconds per week? To me that sounds very little, but I guess that depends on how serious the animator is, and what kind of movie it is.
As for the animation, we will try to keep it as simple as possible as we don't have that much time on the project, but you never know how it comes out until we actually start on the project.
Thanks alot for the replies, We'll think about the things you said and also look into some other forums. We have to decide until Thursday this coming week, so more replies would be nice. Although, this part of the forum seems to have a lack of readers..
swaneon
09-09-2007, 02:38 AM
show us the finished product if you can
thanks
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