No matter how awe-inspiring a lungfish's cakehole is, it's not going to help it move around on land.

[sanspoof]

This animation school was lunk yesterday by mefi, and although I'd seen all the 2d stuff already, I thought to myself, Self, lettuce see how their 3d stuff looks, because kids doing their thesis are probably going to be inspirationally good at such an obviously good school. And thus I looked. And in close juxtaposition, the 3d stuff looked... dead

Comments

[diaryarena]

I think the biggest problem with rigging is that you need to know a lot more of the math (or at least underlying programming complexity) to rig well. So people who are doing thesis projects in animation -- they can probably model really well with a working knowledge of subd surfaces or what it means to have tangent matching on surface joins or whatever, and they can probably texture well with a working knowledge of UV spanning, and they can probably animate well with a working knowledge of handedness and IK pole flipping

[sanspoof]

Agreed. Also, animating straight ahead, as in stop motion, is definitely a different bag of treats. I personally way prefer it, and motion looks less dead and curve-based that way too. But no one will let me do that at jobs.

[diaryarena]

It's 'cause auto-tweening goes against the whole idea of pose-to-pose animation! It's ridiculous.

[sanspoof]

Humm... kinda not, though, depending on your granularity of frames.

[diaryarena]

Yeah, it's just that, you know, fiddling with rotation keyframes and position keyframes and staggering them around, I'm much more likely to end up with blurry (blurred in the fourth dimension anyway) pose-less soup. But I don't storyboard (for no good reason), so it's my own fault.

Actually, I think the two styles take pretty much equal amounts of time to do WELL, so most people who use auto-tweening are clearly slacking off.

[druidbreeze]

Heck, if you ever find ANYONE willing to pay for stop motion LP would be so jealous.

[sanspoof]

There _are_ a couple of studios... but they're few and far between, and honestly I haven't animated puppets since college or shortly thereafter. So probably it wouldn't be so easy to snag a job. Sigh.