I don't consider myself to be the world's greatest animator. I still struggle with lighting and things like that. I'm much more of a "storyteller" who uses 3D than a 3D animator. I can usually come up with a story that I want to tell. Music and audio are rarely a problem. I could probably come up with more creative camera angles but I'm fairly adequate at that as well. The hardest thing for me is the environmentaal aesthetics of the story. What kind of room are my characters in? What season or weather is it? What clothes are they wearing? What objects surround them? Obviously certain aspects are defined by the story ("it was a dark and stormy night in the castle of the Dark Wizard....") but even then there may be tons of variables that I struggle with (what furniture is in his room?). What do you find to be the most difficult aspect of doing animations. Technical? Aesthetics? Audio? Thinking of a full "story?"

Difficult.... in some ways, that's a hard one for me. Often, I WANT to do something in modelling, but run into "you can't do it that way", so I find another way. I believe I, in a way, am the most difficult thing involved. I imagine a room, and populate it with props... no big deal... then we get to the props themselves... I want them EXACTLY as I imagine them. People. Clothing them isn't a problem... almost. I want the fabric to say something... it's old, it's new, it's well cared for, it's a castoff... all of these things are done in the texture, and few of the ones readily available match what I want, so I make it myself. Facial expression is only one tenth of what's going on in a scene... every living, mobile thing has body language... the main character is faced away from the cam, but his body language says he's about to blow his top... the dog is bored, the cat is miffed at being ignored, while the other cat is being smug about having been petted. Details. The hardest part? Learning the patience needed to attend to the details. Maybe I'm wrong, but you sound a little discouraged. Don't be... with time, you will become an old hand at it... just have the wisdom to realise that it DOES take time, and the patience to keep chipping away at it. Lou.

Message edited on: 01/04/2006 20:19

I think you are talking about the whole finished product? Well I think I can make pretty decent animations but on the technical side, lighting is the difficult part for me. Due to my lack of skill on the rendering technical sides I decided to stray from "realism" and go more into stylism. I am getting more into that, though. Right now I am coming up with a nice "realistic " look for a character I am working on (see image)

While working on my sci-fi project for some time now, I've found that one of the most difficult aspects of any animated production is learning when to say "good enough", and move on to the next scene/shot. I've come across a few scenes so far that were absolutely challenging, both mentally and technically, to get right. They may still not be perfect to my eye, but I've learned there comes a point in every animation where you have to stay focused on the end goal, and not tweak every little thing endlessly. Maybe if there's time at the end, you can go back and fix some things, or maybe you'll have to chalk it up to a learning experience and leave it as-is. Either way, you must move forward. Some artists can NEVER stop tweaking things, which is why many animators never finish a project. The temptation to make things perfect the first time around is far too great. ;-) Large CG studios sometimes employ dozens of animators to work on a production. They have TD's (technical directors) that can help them through difficult shots, or they can get help from each other. Small studios, or individual animators, are at a far greater disadvantage in that respect. Often times there's no one there to tell us if a shot doesn't look right, or equally as important, if a shot looks "good enough". There may be no greater challenge in animation than that of self-restraint. Getting a project DONE is probably one of the greatest accomplishments any animator can achieve.

"Getting a project DONE is probably one of the greatest accomplishments any animator can achieve. " That's actually a very good point. Right now I'm working on a "Director's Cut" version of my Renderosity Holiday Animation. I got it "done" for the contest but I spent a number of days fighting with the environment (I finally ended up just having my characters in a space-like unearthly world). I struggled with that so much that I didn't have time to do some of the other things it needed. It was "done" but not "Done." With soooooo many possibilities for everything, it can take one person forever to get everything exactly right (if there even is such a thing). That's one of the reasons I appreciate some of the animations I've seen here. It may have lighting that could be improved, movement that is painfully slow, poor audio, or any one of a number of other things lacking, but I highly respect the tenacity it takes to make a complete animated story or sequence. FWIW, using style to accomodate technical issues (as nemirc mentioned) is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. In fact, sometimes it makes the animation a lot cooler.

I don't consider myself an animator yet, but the hardest part of trying to learn it in Poser has always been working with the graph editor. I've never had any luck with it. I feel animation should be something more natural than messing around with curves and graphs. On the other hand, I once used Character Studio in 3dsmax 8 demo version, and it seemed a lot more intuitive to me. I was able to get at least some natural looking motion out of the biped without having to fiddle about with the graph curves. It seemed really cool. Unfortunately, I was just teasing myself since I can't afford 3dsmax or Maya anyway, but it was nice to dream. haha. I now have Carrara, and hope to continue learning animation with it. Hopefully, I won't have to go into the motion editor as often as I had in Poser.

You can get Maya Personal Learning edition for free at Alias B)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12409&Form.ShowMessage=2530468

I've been running a little experiment with humans lighting in Maya. This is the result of test number one. What I will try to do now is improve the overall quality of the image-based lighting and if there is room for improvement I will up the diffuse lighting a little. I will be posting more and more of it on that thread :p

I've been doing a lot of cell shaded or mostly cell shaded work lately and my biggest thing is trying to figure out exactly what type of look I want. I've spent weeks rendering and rerendering and compositing and recompositing the same scene over and over trying to get it to look just right. I think I'm getting closer now. I had a thread going a while back of the project I'm working on now. I've actually changed rendering styles on it twice since then.

Depends on how you define the job. Technically, the an animator is the person that makes characters come to life, and makes objects move - his only job is, like word suggests, the actual animation. In the company where I work, there are seperate people for the modeling, the rigging and character set up, the texturing, the lighting and final rendering, and post production stuff like compositing, sound mix and sound effects are even done outside of the studio - people are rarely equally good at all aspects of the job. There's usually also a technical director (or TD) supervising the most tedious technical aspects of the character set up, fixing problems where they occur, and there's an animation director to make certain the animators aren't doing individual scenes, but are integrating the scenes into the story. In professional productions, each of the seperate stages are done by experts in their field - which is mostly why individual artists have to struggle so hard, since they have to do everything by themselves, and still want their scenes to be good in every aspect...

The hardest part by far is getting good motion out of the characters. To start with there's the rigging issues. Bad deformations are the first stumbling block, but otherwise, without a good and solid rig there's no way to get decent animation. But even with that, getting something that moves convincingly, reads well, and exudes the character's "character" that's a real bitch difficult thing. Rigging, modelling, lighting, all just technical issues that anyone of a sufficient intelligence can grasp with time. Animation, now that's an art.