How to make 3D animation

Animation production is a very tedious and arduous work, and the division of labor is extremely detailed. Usually divided into pre-production, mid-production and post-production. Pre-production includes planning, work setting and fund raising. Production includes split mirror, original painting, intermediate painting, animation, coloring, background painting, photography, dubbing, recording and so on. Post-production includes editing, special effects, subtitles, synthesis, screening and so on.

First, the overall design stage.

1, Script: The first step in any film production is to create a script, but the script of an animated film is very different from that of a feature film performed by a real person.

Dialogue in general movies is very important for actors' performances, while in animated movies, we should try to avoid complicated dialogues. The most important thing here is to express visual action with pictures. The best animation is achieved through funny actions, in which there is no dialogue, but visual creation stimulates people's imagination.

2. Storyboard. According to the script, the director will draw a sketch of a story similar to a cartoon (a shot drawing the script) to show the actions described in the script.

The storyboard consists of several segments, and each segment consists of a series of scenes. A scene is generally limited to a certain place and a group of people, and the scene can be divided into a series of shots as picture units, thus constructing the overall structure of an animation.

While drawing each shot, the storyboard should have the corresponding action description, telling the truth time, photography description and picture connection as its content. Generally, if there are about 400 shots in a 30-minute animation script, a storyboard with about 800 pictures will be drawn.

3. Shooting range. This is the timetable for the production of the whole film compiled by the director to guide the unified coordination of all parties in the animation creation collective.

Second, the design and production stage.

1. Design: The design work is to determine the form and modeling of background, foreground and props on the basis of storyboard, and complete the design and production of scene environment and background map. In addition, it is necessary to design the shapes of characters or other roles and draw several standard drawings from different angles for other animators' reference.

2. sound. In animation, because the action must match the music, the sound recording must be completed before animation. After the recording is completed, the editor must accurately decompose the recorded sound into every picture position, that is, when to start talking, how long to last, and so on. Finally, the whole sound course (that is, the sound track) should be decomposed into a list, corresponding to the sound of each picture position, for the reference of animators.

Third, the specific creative stage.

1. Original painting creation: Original painting creation refers to some key pictures of animation drawn by animation designers. Usually a designer is only responsible for a fixed role or other roles.

2. Production of intermediate illustration: Intermediate illustration refers to the picture between two important positions or pictures, usually between two original paintings. The assistant animator makes the middle diagram, and the rest artists interpolate and draw the connection diagram of the role action. Interpolating the continuous action of the painting between the original paintings to meet the specified action time and make it close to the natural action.

Fourth, the shooting and production stage.

This stage is an important part of animation production, and any details on the performance screen will be produced here, which can be said to be a key step to determine the quality of animation (the other is the design of content, that is, the script).

The following introduces the specific division of labor or steps of two-dimensional animation and three-dimensional animation at this stage.

Extended data

Making tools:

3Dmax software

The strength of 3Dmax software lies in its polygon tool components and the adjustment ability of UV coordinate map. In addition, for beginners, it is also its strengths and weaknesses. Because the tools provided by this software are very rich, you can have several different choices when solving the same problem.

Maya software

Maya contains all animation tools, such as IK/FK, blending deformation, SetDrivenKey, animation curves, expressions and so on. Due to Maya's advanced architecture, all properties in Maya can be animated.

In addition, Maya's animation tools can become more powerful through rich scripts and plug-ins. Maya also includes a nonlinear animation editing tool, which makes animation editing more convenient.

light wave

Lightwave's modeling tools are excellent. If there is any function of this software, it is a modeling tool. At the same time, there are many changes in their use methods, which can greatly improve the learning efficiency. Lightwave's renderer is considered to be one of the best parts of this software. It doesn't need any plug-ins and is very simple.