3D animation is another beautiful way to bring a story to life. A lot of people love 3D animation, but they don’t realize the amount of work that goes into the finished product. This is why animations take years to make from start to finish!
Pre Production
Just like live-action videos, 3D animation requires a lot of pre-production. Before we jump into the 3D animation, we need to start with 2D animation. Once you have an idea and write the script, we move into storyboarding. From the storyboarding phase, we create animatics to ensure the story is going in the direction we want it to. Now we get into the fun part…
Modeling
The modeling process is when animators take “primitives” and make them into objects. Single points, lines, edges, and 3D shapes are all primitives, and once combined, lead to objects that we use in the final animation. This can be what the characters look like, furniture in the scene, little props. All of this is part of the modeling stage.
Texturing
Once you have the models, we need to give them personality. This is where we add colors and textures to make it so that they look more realistic. Sometimes you can even take pictures of a real-life object and add that on top of a model to give it life. These textures can also be created in photoshop and then imported into your animation software.
Rigging
Once we have all the models with the textures in place, we move onto rigging. This is when we give the 3D models and characters a skeleton. When we provide them with the skeleton we make them ready to animate.
Animating
This is the part most people are familiar with. This is where we slowly make the animation move and record the process. Animation can take a long time as you have to capture all the movements slowly.
At this point, you probably think we’re done, but we are in fact, not. Okay so we have all the models and they move and look realistic enough but what’s next? Well, we have…
Lighting and Camera
Lighting elevates a given scene. When you add light, the scene looks more dimensional and reel. If some of the textures you applied are shiny, you can see how the light reflects off those textures. The cameras are also placed into the scene to show, so we’re capturing the models from various angles.
Rendering, Compositing, and Special FX
If you think it’s over, it’s not. Once all the lighting and cameras are in, we need to render out the final images and tweak things. This is also the stage in which we add any visual effects such as explosions.
If you want to see the whole process in action, here’s a timelapse of the procedure done in 18 minutes. (Imagine how long the actual process takes). Do you want a 3D animation? Contact us today!
