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Advanced Work-flow: Using A Two-Medium Approach
 By: Kenny Roy, AnimationMentor.com Mentor When studying Character Animation, one typically spends only a fraction of the time learning the actual material; the majority of a student's effort is spent defining, creating, and refining a work-flow. Students start piecing together a method by emulating the lectures and classmates. Later, as they complete more work, and encounter diverse animation challenges, personal preferences begin to pervade the standard work-flow. In the end, give twenty different animators the same shot, and you can bet to witness twenty different ways to tackle it. So what is a Two-Medium Approach? (I'll use the acronym TMA from now on. Can I copyright that?) Simply put, TMA is the practice of switching between hand drawn and CG animation, whenever one method offers a better way to overcome an animation obstacle. This approach is taken naturally by traditional animators who switch to CG, but it can also be adapted by those of us brought up in the CG realm. When utilized correctly, a two-medium work-flow empowers an animator to avoid being ensnared by the pitfalls of CG animation – idiosyncrasies of the medium that add up to the well-known problem of CG animation being "hard-to-edit". It is important to note this approach assumes the animator is familiar and comfortable with both mediums. In order to start using this approach with no traditional training, I highly suggest the motivated student download and follow John K's "$100,000 Animation Course". Then, pick a 2D animation package and get practicing. Because not every animator can draw, a CG animation curriculum usually requires no more than basic drawing skills; thumb-nailing one's scene, for instance, is done at a level that is only "for you." If you get what you need from chicken scratches, well, great! But for those of you that can draw, TMA might be the work-flow that pushes your animation to the next level! Here's how it works. You begin your scene the way you always do. For most, this entails a thumb-nailing and/or reference-gathering stage. From your thumbnails, the scene is laid out. When the scene progresses into the territory of posing, you are in blocking. However, let's assume that you've hit an obstacle: the timing of an action is giving you trouble, and the complexity of the model is making it so that posing is taking up all your time. What can you do? Switch to your favorite 2D animation package (Flash, PAP, Mirage - I'll link them all at the end of the article) and get to working out the problem! In 2D, you can forgo the complex task of posing a 3D rig, and get the information you need from gestural drawings. Time out the action until you are satisfied with the motion, and then switch back to your 3D scene. Now you have gestural drawings that represent forceful action, already timed out and ready for camera - all you have to do now is copy your work onto the clunky rig! Jump forward a couple of days on a shot. The director calls for a large performance change - what do you do? Jump into 2D and get re-blocking! You see, on certain shows that I've been a part of, the mere complexity of the rig (I'm talking about Kong here) made it so that even creating the four or five key poses that comprise a performance tweak could take hours. With that kind of shot overhead, being able to have a solid version in less than an hour to work towards can mean the difference between hitting a deadline, and staying the weekend. Developing skills in the traditional medium means giving yourself yet another way to save time, solve problems, and push your work. Does it seem like a good idea yet? How do you know when to switch mediums? First, we have to identify the strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons, of both mediums. Let's start with CG. CG Pros CG Cons So there's the majority of considerations with the CG medium. At a glance, it looks like the computer takes a lot of work out of our hands, but that's not always a good thing. And it's at those exact moments that you want to try working your scene in 2D. Let's look at traditional animation's strengths and weaknesses. Traditional Pros Traditional Cons Now that we have discerned the differences between the two mediums, let's put a Two Medium Approach to the test on a real shot:
Credit: Brett Bennett In this shot, one of my students was having trouble implementing a change that I was trying to describe in my E-Critiques. In the playblast, pay special attention to the way that the character lacks force in the throw. The motion is without real physical weight or impact, and in my E-Critique and Q&A's I advised that a cartoony suspension in the air, and pushing the poses to the point of breaking would add a lot to the shot. This is a great time for some TMA, since the shot already has some work in it that we don't want to risk destroying. While thumb-nailing the change is a great start on troubleshooting a scene, if you cannot watch the drawings at speed, you will be at a disadvantage. Using Plastic Animation Paper, I quickly drew out some key poses that the character should hit. By cloning the frames, I could get a very rough timing of the new action. Here is a quicktime of the re-blocked action. Notice how I gave myself free reign in terms of the amount I could push the poses. It didn't matter to me that I was breaking the model in these poses, the point of switching to 2D to re-block the action is to infuse the performance with as much punch as possible. With that in mind, I was happy with my poses, and was ready to add some breakdowns. In this next quicktime notice that I added the breakdowns that were necessary to define the moments when I wanted to really bend physics and make an animated moment. The slight impossible anticipation upwards before the caveman slams the rock down, and the way that he is propelled even higher into the air afterwards are moments that would be difficult to create in a 3D paradigm, if for no other reason than the interpolation of the keys would bog the animator down with useless, soupy in-betweens; everyone knows that when you delete a block of frames in the middle of shot, the result is mush. By jumping over to the light-box, an animator is able to free his or herself from the shackles of the 3D paradigm. Let's review. In this example, the scene had some animation surrounding the trouble spot. This means that the curves and keys already in place are going to greatly affect the ability of the animator to make non-destructive changes. Roughing the scene in 2D and bringing a clear, moving example back into three dimensions eliminates the errors you can introduce by trying to 'fix' only a section of a long shot. Also, the posing was in need of a big cartoony push. Rather than combat the limitations of the model, having a 2D example to match will greatly ease the difficulty of pushing a 3D rig. As you can see, when the limitations of working in 3D are outweighed by the advantages of traditional, it's time to switch mediums. Nail the animation any way you can, and get it back into the 3D scene and working again. I hope this example of an advanced work-flow inspires you to venture away from the 3D space and explore some problem-solving methods out there. Like all work-flow tricks, having more than one technique to overcome the obstacles you will face on the job only makes you a more marketable animator, and not to mention, will mean more fun as you work. And that is the most important thing. Look forward to working with you, Kenny Email Kenny: kennyskorner (at) animationmentor.com Kenny Recommends: Some other 2D animation programs:
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