Week 12 Exercise 2

1)Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 2D animation? Explain your view.

We do need some drawing skills (doesn't have to be extremely good in drawing) to create a good 2D animation. As by drawing the model out, we will understand the model more and also be able to visualize the model out.

 2) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 3D animation? Explain your view.

Similarly to question 1, I think that we do need to have some drawing skills to create a good 3D animation, to help us to visualize the model.  As it can helps us in knowing better of which shapes to use or what techniques skills to use. But we do not have to draw really well to create a good 3D animation, just being able to draw out the basic outline of the model will do.

 3) What do you think would separate a piece of poor animation from a piece of good animation? In other words, how would you go about deciding if a piece of animation is good or bad?

I think the most important point in judging a piece of poor animation and a piece of good animation is the realism of the model. If the model look realistic and look as real as the object model itself, it is counted as a piece of good animation. As it will be able to let the user recognize the object instantly without having any doubts. 

 4) In 2D animation, you need to be very aware of timing at a frame by frame level, using timing charts and other techniques - but for 3D animation, this is handled using the graph editor, which is more concerned with manipulating rates of change over time.

 Does this affect how you approach your animation work? Explain.

It does not affect much when I am approaching my animation work. The graph editor helps us draw the arcs and curves, but definitely we still need to change the graph by using the tangents available to make it look perfect. Also, we still need to key in key-frame in specific timing which means frame-by-frame basis is still being used. So overall, it did not make much changes.

 5) Give a brief critique of Maya as an animation tool. Don't just say Maya makes animation difficult, or easy, or that you need to learn a lot of stuff to use Maya - explain what Maya does well and not so well in terms of creating animation.

Maya is a good animation tool, it might seems hard to use at first but as you get to learn about the basic of Maya, it is quite easy to use and adapt to it. Also, Maya does a good job in creating animation by having convenience technique for us to use when we are creating the model. For example, the graph editor. By just seeing the graph editor and adjust the tangents accordingly, we can make the model's movement look more perfect and realistic.

However, in Maya, when we are creating more complex model, it is difficult for us to do it in Maya. One of the problem we faced, is regarding the shapes. As there are only limited shapes available for us to use, some shapes that we need does not include in Maya so we can only have to find similar or close to shape to replace it which change the original form of the model.