Week 12 Exercise 2

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

Personally, I don't think you need to able to draw well to create good 2D animation. Some very good 2D animations comes with very simple drawings, often in the form of stick-men or dots. Good drawing only adds to the appeal and does not guarantee a good 2D animation. Also, focusing too much on drawing well could lead to neglecting good animation.

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

As with the above, I still do not believe that you need to draw well to create good 3D animation. It is not the design that matters for 3D; rather the key-framing, the outlining and the rigging of the model is what is more important. Simple design makes it easier to animate and this usually leads to good animation.

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 one thing that separates poor and good animation is whether or not the movement is believable should a similar situation happen in real life, unless the animation is meant to be cartoonic. If it is supposed to be cartoonic, I think it is the smoothness of the animation that will determine its quality.

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.

 No. Technically, both of them are similar as it revolves around the timing of the animation. The only main difference I see is that 3D requires the user to pay some attention on the model's surrounding while 2D model only have one view to worry about. 3D animation is also more varied and flexible.

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 does well in allowing a large number of options for modelers to create models and animators to create good animations. The options seems almost endless and there are so many of them, I think it will take a very long time to learn and understand them. However, it can be laggy and not really user-friendly, especially for new users as a lot of jargons are used. Regardless, tutorials can help and overall, the tool is very good.