My Advice to Newbies

[danf]

You know, I'm finishing up my first animation and all, so I'm a total pro... hahaha. But I've hit hundreds of hurdles, and I've got to say there's some basic stuff that would be well to place in the TAO:AM routine. Call it my A:M wisdom to this point... call it me venting my frustrations. Either way, it's healthy for me, it's healthy for new students, so drink milk:

 

While Lesson 1 does a good job of introducing one to the "talent" pool, and notion of a "pose," I think it fails to properly represent the workflow intrinsic to the design of A:M. When understood, the design of A:M is a beautiful thing that puts everything at your fingertips. When not understood, you backtrack, lose files, get inconsistent shots, and more!

 

Understanding the "File -> New" submenu is a great way to grasp the workflow early. What's in this submenu?

 

-Choreography

-Model

-Action

-Material

 

Notice these are ALSO all main folders in your PROJECT WORKSPACE. Grow to love your Project Workspace. It is your home. To the right, it even has the keyframe sliders you'll use to animate later (get a second monitor). Sure, make a folder to keep your project files on in your hard drive, but that hardly matters once things are in A:M. What matters, is that you have all the ingredients in your Project Workspace (PWS for short) to create your final animation!

 

Your final animation will be renders from cameras within CHOREOGRAPHY files! CHOREOGRAPHY files are the sets, the locations, the only place in the program where you bring multiple different objects together, set up your own lights and cameras, and record them. It is very helpful, once you have designed each "set" of your movie, to right-click on that choreography file, and "Save as..." a file named something fundamental, and then "Save as..." AGAIN, as a file named after the first scene using that .cho file!!! THIS WAY you DO NOT EDIT THE ORIGINAL, AND IT REMAINS UNTAINTED WITH YOUR VARIOUS SCENES!!!!

 

But what composes your "set"? MODELS, of course! TAO:AM goes over modeling quite nicely, but here's what else I learned: When you have your movie in mind, the models can seem like a real pain to get through, like hoops to jump through on the way to your great vision. Well GUESS WHAT? Hahahahahahahahaha, THEY ARE YOUR VISION!!! Animators in the Golden Age of Animation had to draw each character and prop anew in every frame of their movie. YOU only have to draw each one once! BUT IT HAS TO BE GOOD FROM ALL ANGLES. (Not if it's only seen from one angle of course) BUT- You OWE IT TO YOUR MODELS to give them plenty of TLC to repay them for the amount of time you're saving by only "drawing" them once.

 

I can't speak on skeletons because I didn't create any after TAO:AM, I used stock characters! But what I can speak for is poses! Skeletons and poses are the ingredients that will bring your models to life in the .cho file. Skeletons are great because they make posing on the fly very easy, but BE WARNED!!!: Do not enter the .cho file without everything you need to get out!!! Bwahahahaha! That means you need to gear up! (Your models!) Emotionally, and in every other way they will exhibit their livelihoods on screen! So don't slack designing your poses either! Spend some time acting in the pose creator with your character. This is the time you get to design your character's range as an actor. Make sure your eyes (number of poses) are AT LEAST as big as your stomach (the final performance).

 

While at first you might say to yourself: "My character only has like, five emotions in this movie, so I'll just make a pose for each emotion." WRONG!!! Do not confuse EMOTIONS with POSES!!! A POSE is a UNIT OF EXPRESSION. When you're creating poses, you're messing with the control points of your model! That's a pain! So get economical! Find the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATORS of emotion! I have "Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right" on my Amazon wish list this holiday season, because my money says the author spent some time whittling this down for us. But until I get that book, I'll do my best! What do lots of emotions share? Eyebrows raised! Are they always raised together? It's a personal issue! Decide for your character, then create poses accordingly. Mouth Open! Eyelids squinted! Personally, I LOVE having a slider for EACH EYELID, and I'm talking ALL FOUR. If your character speaks, obviously you're making all the phenomes, but don't forget the building blocks of nonverbal communication, this is animation, so you're going to need each emotion to develop. It's going to be more nuanced than sliding their face from "neutral" to "surprised," although if it's a quick transition, that just might work.

 

Also don't neglect that when building new poses, they INCORPORATE ANY ACTIVE POSES WHEN CREATED. That means once you've got all your eyelids, eyebrows, cheeks puffed, nostrils flared, smiles, frowns, scrunches and raises down, you can create new poses composed entirely of pre-existing elements! And then in the .cho? You can fine tune them. Yeah, it's awesome. Your poses are the bullets in your acting-gun. Don't go into battle without plenty of ammo.

 

But poses aren't the only weapon in your .cho file arsenal! You also have ACTIONS!! They're like poses, but they MOVE! And they can involve poses... makes sense, don't it?

 

I don't know how everyone else does it with A:M, but you've got two distinct ways of giving a character movement, once in a .cho file. You can either activate skeletal mode and create keyframes by hand with all the rest of the set around them, madly clicking on the wrong things and making objects invisible just to get a hand on them, or you can make action files, which you drag on the character, and that makes them move fine too. (Once you add the action to an object, it'll show up under their shortcut in that scene's .cho file in the PWS. If you want them to perform more than that action, you'll need to slide the action's box wider... I don't even know how to explain what I'm saying. I'm guessing everyone has to start a thread about this to learn it. Don't be afraid to start a thread on the forum, they're nice people.)

 

There are advantages and disadvantages to either method. Typically, I do everything I can as Action files, especially if it's anything I'll use twice. Lots of the time you'll need to do some tuning in the .cho file. This is healthy and normal. None of your objects are in a vacuum, after all, right? Unless they are. Isn't this a beautiful art form? You can really go anywhere.

 

I also have a strong feeling that I need to spend more time making my environments, but don't ask me how to do that!!! They add a lot to a project! No wonder the studios have... studios of people!!!

 

In case you haven't considered this very basic fact: You're entering the world of animation. This is a hundred something year old tradition (http://www.hash.com/ftp/VM/Hx_animation/hx_anim.html). It's been mastered in the past, and people know crap when they see it. So if you're going to breathe life into some lines of code, you might as well do it convincingly. I found "The Animator's Survival Guide" by Richard Williams to be PRICELESS. Also, listen to the "Splinecast" podcast. It's a free series of interviews you can find in the iTunes music store, composed almost entirely of professional animators working at Pixar, talking shop. A great way to learn while in the car. It will give you a feel for the tradition you are continuing when you set out to create the "Illusion of Life" (another book that everyone recommends, which I haven't read far enough into yet to understand why).

 

Well, I hope this helps someone someday, it's been fun to write. Just remember, each step of your animation is composed of ingredients. And each ingredient is a mix of ingredients. As long as you mix the ingredients with care at each step, your final cake will be a real pie.

[MJL]

Thank you, Daniel.

 

I've had A:M since June, and have made various forays with the software including TaoA:M and a few other things. Your simple linear explanation was enlightening to say the least. I've been lurking the forum for months reading every post that comes on, including your search for a way to make a digital readout. I've learned quite a few things about quite a few things. I've been getting good glimpses of some fascinating trees, but after reading your post the forest begins to make sense. It seems that most of the good people posting on the forum, helping out us newbies, have been using A:M for so long, through so many generations of the software, that things that they don't even think about anymore are mysteries to some of us newbies.

 

Thanks again for your insight. Please continue to expound as it comes to you. I, for one, will be more than glad to absorb anything you have to say.

 

Myron

 

P.S.

Sign on for S.O. We need you.

[TheSpleen]

Read it all.

Great post.

[Rodney]

Daniel,

Thank you for taking the time to relate your experiences.

Feedback is extremely important (especially to the newbie in us all).

[robcat2075]

I agree there is much to learn beyond TAoA:M. The defense I would offer for TAoA:M is that it is small enough not to scare off the new user. It's rather like a quick-start guide to the major feature points of A:M so a user can get some base-level understanding and get to accomplishing SOMETHING quickly without getting overwhelmed by the enormous possibilities.

 

Back around V7 or so you got a manual of almost 700 pages. It certainly had more detail in it but it was almost like you had to read the entire book before you could start.

 

My hope is that we can get every new user to connect with the forum where their post-TAoA:M questions can be answered.

[danf]

Oh yeah, I don't mean to disgrace TAO:AM, I never would've learned without it! But while it explores and teaches all the fundamental skills, I hoped to convey the workflow itself, something no single tutorial gets a chance to explore. This is meant as a supplement, since after all, it's really just a compilation of my frustrations from trying to animate, post-TAO:AM.

[Gerry]

Dan - a terrific, basic overview of the process. Feel free to write more when you get inspired. I never get tired of having the basics reiterated back to me because it's easy to forget some of the basics no matter how advanced you get.

[heyvern]

Back around V7 or so you got a manual of almost 700 pages. It certainly had more detail in it but it was almost like you had to read the entire book before you could start.

 

I still have mine! The spiral binding is a bit rusty now. I was going to post a photo of it but it's in a box in the basement and it's got some strange mold growing on it and I'm afraid to touch it. I remember many a time reading it in the "porcelain library" trying to learn about "Euler angles"... that could be where the mold originated.

 

-vern

[robcat2075]

Here's some pics of mine.

 

 

 

V5 on the left was actually called "Martin Hash's 3D Animation". "Martin Hash's Animation:Master" was the name for what would later be called the NetRender version.

 

After V5 the names were unified again.

 

Before V5 you didn't get a manual, you got a pamphlet! The manuals were a big improvement but I can imagine the cost of printing them was substantial and they seemed to be growing by about 150 pages with every version.

 

The good news now is that almost all of the information in the manuals is now in the "help" menu. You just have to search for it a bit more.

[Gerry]

I've got the manual from v8 and I still use it all the time!