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

Personally, I don't think that to create a good 2D animation requires a good drawing skills.
Most importantly is to be able to sketch or plan what exactly we want in the animation and go about doing it. Moreover, 2D does not require as much details as compared to 3D, therefore, simple sketches can also help us get our way through in creating

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

Mastering a good drawing skills do make it much more easier in creating a 3D animation but as technologies starts improving, more and more features were being built into 3D programs which bring more conveniences in creating a good 3D animation even if you do not have superb drawing skills.

For example, 3D programs like Maya have many built in features that help us to create good animation. Simple sphere, cubes, cylinder can be easily created within a few clicks in the program.

Therefore, I think that having superb drawing skill is not essential but a bonus in creating good 3D animation. What matter most is the product that we are going to present.

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?

Personally, I find the most important key to a good animation is not about the content but the quality of graphics. The quality of the graphics will determine if a particular animation is good enough especially when we are focusing more on 3D object.

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 will affect how we approach our work to a certain extent that we might neglect the important detail that we need to look into about too. Timing charts are also important in ensuring that the animation runs well and smoothly. If we do not focus on the timing charts, animation will not be as nice due to reasons like graphics do not flow smoothly frame to frame.

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 creating animation in a way that the program allows us to do many things without having to switch to other programs in the process of creating a good animation. We can create models, decorate the scenes, link all the scenes together, add special effects and etc. It's like a one stop area for creating an animation as the program is equipped with many useful features. But this one stop area also make it tougher to find the features that you want to use because it is a one stop area, therefore, many things were being cramp together in a program making it tedious for us to do simple task.

Week 11, E-learning, Squash and Stretch.

Why is squash and stretch so useful in animation?

The squash and stretch technique is useful in animation because it can make the animation look more realistic, as if you are watching it from real life, because the technique adopted the real characteristic of, for example, how a ball bounce across a room in real life.

Think of a situation in which extreme squash and stretch could be applied to a character - try to be original.

I think that the process of cracking an egg can be a situation whereby extreme squash and stretch can be applied to.

The squash can be when the egg was being cracked, the process of the yolk and egg white before landing into bowls or plate and the squash part will be when the yolk and egg white landed onto the bowl or plate. Because before landing, it's shape will be like a giant water drop and when it landed, it became flat.
I'm not sure whether the stretch part is valid but the effect of squash part can actually be fully illustrated just when the egg land onto the surface.

Think of an animation example where squash and stretch would NOT be appropriate.

I think squash and stretch will not be applicable if the animation illustrate a person hopping his way across somewhere. Because human cannot be stretched and squashed when hopping, logically. It may seems that there are a bit of stretching and squashing but using human might not be able to successfully illustrate the squash and stretch movements.

If squash and stretch doesn't really happen so obviously in real life, why do you think is it so effective in animation?

Personally, I think the reason why squash and stretch is effective in animation is because it helps to draw people's attention and also make the animation more realistic as though it's real. In order to make an animation to be as realistic as in real life, exaggerated movement like squash and stretch will be needed to show the movement of certain objects that involves similar movement when in real life.

Week 10

What is ease-in-ease-out in reference to animation?

Ease-in-ease-out refers to a process during a particular movement for something.
The process of ease-in-ease-out occurs when it involves a different speed in actions. For example, a running scene. Before the character starts to run, their speed will be slow initially then increases when the character starts running and slow down again when they are about to stop.

What does frames per second mean?

It refers to the number of scenes being played within a second.