Moho Forum

I hear that extreme detailing is what makes an animation truely good graphically otherwise it's "boring & poor". I don't think this is the case though.

I wanted to ask, What makes an animation look clean and smooth when you don't have the extreme patience for total detailing? I there a way to animate that makes an animation graphically good but requires less work?

I don't feel like detailing everything down to the last hair just for my animations to look okay.

help me out?

The more you work on details, the more your animation will look detailed.
There is no way to "make" something more detailed if you don't add those details on it.
Anime Studio will help you greatly whit its automatic in-between, recordable actions and interpolable vectors...
But if you want numbers on a watch (For example) you have to put that numbers on it... And if you want that watch look more "rounder", you have to add, remove and adjust the vectors points on it (Or modify the raster if you use it.)

Have a trip to the next library and look into "Disney Animation - The Illusion of Life". It doesn't cover "details" as a separate topic, but every here and then it mentions how a character must not be overloaded with details - it needs to be readable.

Study the work of other animators. Chris Hinton (http://vimeo.com/21773), Ernest Pintoff (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdlMIE9egpE), Borivij Dovnikovic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx-ajEYz ... re=related) are all animators who leave out most of the distracting details, yet deliver their story.

The better your animation, the less details you need. Characters don't need many features - even a stick figure is able to communicate complex emotions. Any graphical style must serve the story, otherwise it's wasted. A bad example are TV shows which boast some "cutting edge" design but only tell old stories in a cookie-cutter way.

In one of my own films (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iftpa30dDI) I had to work with very simplified characters, so I put the details into the backgrounds and props: textures and brush strokes, just enough eye candy to keep the viewer interested.

Not details will make your animation look good. Good animation will look good.

slowtiger wrote:Have a trip to the next library and look into "Disney Animation - The Illusion of Life". It doesn't cover "details" as a separate topic, but every here and then it mentions how a character must not be overloaded with details - it needs to be readable.

Study the work of other animators. Chris Hinton (http://vimeo.com/21773), Ernest Pintoff (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdlMIE9egpE), Borivij Dovnikovic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx-ajEYz ... re=related) are all animators who leave out most of the distracting details, yet deliver their story.

The better your animation, the less details you need. Characters don't need many features - even a stick figure is able to communicate complex emotions. Any graphical style must serve the story, otherwise it's wasted. A bad example are TV shows which boast some "cutting edge" design but only tell old stories in a cookie-cutter way.

In one of my own films (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iftpa30dDI) I had to work with very simplified characters, so I put the details into the backgrounds and props: textures and brush strokes, just enough eye candy to keep the viewer interested.

Not details will make your animation look good. Good animation will look good.

It seems my bad english make me misunderstand the topic...
Sorry for that...

Datawraith wrote:I hear that extreme detailing is what makes an animation truely good graphically otherwise it's "boring & poor". I don't think this is the case though.

You think right. Good animation doesn't rely on details. It's about clear expression and strongly stated ideas. It's about the bold statement. Animation is crude (even the best Disney features are crude).

Details can and will distract from clarity and boldness. A lot of CGI animation suffers from this (because the computer makes it so easy to dive into details like intricate texturing and shading, particle systems, physics and all that).

No amount of wrinkles and folds in drapery will save animation, nor will individually rendered strands of hairs and blades of grass. Such details are unimportant (unless your animation is about drapery wrinkles or waving grass). Nobody will want to watch an animation just because "the drapery is handled so sensitively" (by the way, folds and wrinkles can strengthen a pose, but only if it follows and accentuates that pose, it's about the pose, not about the folds). The addition of such details will hardly improve animation. Moreover, there's a serious risk that it will harm clarity. And it takes lots of time and work.

I wanted to ask, What makes an animation look clean and smooth when you don't have the extreme patience for total detailing? I there a way to animate that makes an animation graphically good but requires less work?

I hope you're not looking for a way to make animation be less work because "animation is nothing but work" (as written by Richard Williams). Ub Iworks averaged 600 drawings a day, doesn't sound like a walk in the park to me.

There's no easy formula. It just takes lots of drawing. Quick drawing. Just make a 100 sketches of real life poses each evening like this (I just draw from freezed frames from DVDs).





As you can see, these are very crude drawings but that's the point. If you have to do it quick then you're forced to concentrate on the important things. There's no time for intricate detailing (or even proper proportions as can be seen). Drawings like these are very easy to exaggerate and turn into cartoons.

google Michael Dudok de Wit.