Pixar style animation workflow?

[harkyman]

Starting your short animation project by modeling and detailing you characters will probably end up nowhere. There are a couple of great books available on the entire short animation production process. One is platform neutral (Inspired Short 3D Film Making, iirc) and uses examples pulled from larger studio short productions. The other (Animating with Blender: Creating Short Animations for Start to Finish) is Blender specific for the computer part of things, but about 1/2 the book works on things like organization, planning, storyboarding, sound, post-pro, etc., which are platform agnostic.

I'd highly recommend becoming familiar with the whole (big) process before you start modeling.

[bad-j]

Hi,

Irrespective of which software that you use, i.e., Maya or Max, you can create great pixar style animation. Zbrush is mostly used for detailing. I prefer using Maya for rigging and animation. So I would model the base characters first in Maya, export to Zbrush for detailing and revert back to Maya for texturing and rigging.

Irrespective of whether if the animation is in a Pixar style or any other, planning is important. Make sure all the storyboards are ready so that you can decide on detailing. It is better to create a 1. Box model of the character, 2. A mid-level detail of the character with dynamics like hair and cloth and 3. a high-poly/detailed mesh. Animating with a heavy mesh can turn out to be disastrous. You can create a slider on the main controller of the rig to alternate between these levels of detail(LOD). LOD1 can be used to block out poses and LOD2 can be used to refine the animation. LOD3 is normally used for a final test and eventual final render.

After the texturing and the rigging process is complete make sure the enviorment/ props are set right. Here also using proxies can turn out to be a great time/computing saver.

Now depending on your choice you can head into animation or lighting. But for me I prefer to set the camera and animate. After I am satisfied with my test renders on my animations with LOD1/2, I move to lighting.

In the lighting stage you can switch between LOD2 and LOD3. A basic 3 light system wouldn't always be satisfactory. Find out place where you would need to adjust the lighting. This would also be a good time to start on vfx like smoke, dust, fire, etc... These elements require the proper level of lighting to sell off.

Once this is complete you can head into setting up the render. Rendering in layers is the best method so that you can composite objects separately.

Note:
1. If you have the time and budget, go for an editorial/pre-viz animation after the storyboarding... mostly with pencil or flash... this can help you to block out poses and decide the camera angles.
2. If sound is required then try to have two recording sessions. One would be a rough one to serve as a guideline for animation. It would be better to have a video recording of this session done also. It would serve as a reference for facial animation and other antics. The second recording will serve as a dubbing session. Voice-over actors sometime find it difficult to get out the right emotions out with only the script in hand. During this session they can have also the final rendered animation with or without other sound effects. This would empower the dialogue, something that we can't point out but without it we would call a person to be a fake or not sincere.

That's all that I have to share. This pretty much works for all styles of animations. Sorry if it went too long on something that you already knew.

All the best!!

[robcat2075]

a short, Pixar style animation

There's only about a thousand different things that could mean. ;)
.

My advice, whatever you do, is start small. Few characters, short running time (<30 seconds), minimal set.

Tho worst animations are the ones that don't get finished. If you actually finish even a short short, you'll be ahead of 90% of the people who try such things.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.