Showing posts with label Animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Animation. Show all posts

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Animation Lighting

Advanced animators often consider lighting even during character design.

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Successful lighting for animation relies on a combination of thoughtful character design and carefully orchestrated lighting. Animators should design their characters with potential lighting schemes in mind, then stage and light their scenes for the clearest silhouette, and in a way appropriate to the content of the story as it unfolds.

Related Searches: Light and Character Design

and character design are inextricably intertwined. In live action projects, the major factor that determines the shape of a character silhouette is the actor playing that character -- and to a lesser extent the costuming. In animation, you must take care to design a character that will read clearly in profile. As you make work on your character designs, periodically trace outlines of each and fill them in with black to see how your choices have affected their silhouettes. A character should be readily identifiable by a monochrome silhouette alone. If not, go back to the drawing board and rework your model sheet. Likewise, the silhouette of each character in a production should be distinct and different enough from the others that an audience member would be able to distinguish them from each other in a silhouette lineup.

Basic Lighting

Acclaimed cinematographer and USC professor Woody Omens recommends that his students "light from the bottom." In other words, begin with no light, and add lights thoughtfully and with intention until your scene has been adequately illuminated. The opposite approach involves setting up a bright key light, or main light source, and a fill light, or secondary light source, and then adding flags and bounces to adjust the results. Lighting "from the top" has a long tradition in cinema history, but thoughtless reliance on the method can potentially weaken a scene. Though bounces and flags do not exist in a 2-D animator's vocabulary, lighting from the top has been overused by classical animators as well.

One Object, One Shadow

In the real world, many sources of light fall upon any single object simultaneously, making a overlapping array of shadows. But in the artificial worlds of cinema and animation -- at least in most cases -- a character should have a single shadow. When using 3-D models for 2-D, characters pick out the most prominent shadow in a scene and do not attempt to recreate the rest.

Light and Emotion

Anyone who has seen a noir film from the 1940s or 1950s can attest to the potential power of truly emotional lighting. Imagine if "The Maltese Falcon" or Roman Polanski's neo-noir "Chinatown" took place in rooms as bright and sterile as a hospital room, instead of the dimly lit locales film fanatics have come to know and love. Low-key lighting can signal moodiness, mystery, sadness or suspense. Flat, even lighting feels neutral. High-key lighting can signal happiness, confidence or clarity. Take time with your choices and try to light for the highest emotional impact for the scene in question.

ReferencesJohn K Stuff: Animation School Lesson 7: Combining Construction With Clear SilhouettesPhoto Credit Jupiterimages/Creatas/Getty ImagesRead Next:

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Monday, December 12, 2011

How to Insert an Animation in Kompozer

KompoZer can insert animated GIFs and Flash applets.

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KompoZer, an open-source Web page editor, can embed animations in your Web pages. To insert an animated GIF image, use KompoZer’s normal image-inserting tool; however, if you have a Flash animation, you have to edit your Web page’s HTML source. KompoZer doesn’t have a function that can insert Flash files graphically, but you can insert a Flash file with a small “” tag.

Related Searches:Difficulty:Moderately EasyInstructions Animated GIF1

Click the “Image” button on the KompoZer toolbar, or click the “Insert” menu and select “Image.”

2

Enter the animated GIF’s address in the image location box. You can type its URL or type a relative location. For example, if you have an animation named “animation.gif” in the same directory as your Web page files, type “animation.gif” into the image location box. If you have an animation named “animation.gif” in an “Images” directory that is in the same directory as your Web page files, type “images/animation.gif” instead.

3

Type a description of the image into the alternate text box.

4

Click “OK” to insert the animation.

5

Position the animated image by dragging and dropping it in the KompoZer window.

Flash1

Click the “Source” tab at the bottom of the KompoZer window to view your Web page’s HTML source code.

2

Add the following text to your page’s HTML source. Position the text where you want the animation to appear on the page:


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Sunday, December 11, 2011

How to Add Different Camera Views to Your Animation in Blender

Print this articleThe Blender open-source 3D rendering and animation program offers users a powerful free alternative to professional modeling and rendering software such as 3DS Max, Mudbox and Maya. The software offers many of the features present in the professional options, including the ability to create multiple cameras to view rendered images and animations at predetermined angles. By adding new camera views to a scene, modelers and animators gain a significant amount of control over how their finished creations appear.

Related Searches:Difficulty:Moderately EasyInstructions 1

Launch Blender and open the animation scene you wish to add camera views to by using the "Open..." option in the "File" menu.

2

Press the spacebar on your keyboard to open the Toolbox tool interface. Click the "Add" menu and select the "Camera" option to add a new camera to your scene. The camera appears in a position facing the viewing angle of the viewpoint window you have selected.

3

Click the new camera to select it if it is not already selected. Drag the camera to a new position as you would any other object in the scene. Select the "Cameras" option in the "View" menu and choose the "Select Active Object as Active Camera," then press the "F12" key to render the scene from the camera's position to ensure that you have it placed exactly like you want it.

4

Add additional cameras using the Toolbox interface or by selecting an existing camera and pressing the "Ctrl" and "D" keys on your keyboard to duplicate it. Drag the cameras to new positions to set up multiple camera angles for your scene.

Tips & Warnings

The Blender programming script "camera_changer.py" allows you to change camera angles in mid-animation using cameras that you've set up in the scene. Using the script, you can rename the cameras to a list of frame numbers in which the camera should become active, resulting in the camera name appearing as "1, 25, 50" for a camera that should become active at frames 1, 25 and 50. When rendering the final animation, the script changes the viewing angle to the appropriate camera automatically on the frames mentioned in the camera name.

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ReferencesBlender: Reference - ToolboxBlender: Blender Hotkeys In-Depth ReferenceBlender 3D Videos: 2.49 Camera ChangerRead Next:

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