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Have you dreamt about learning how they make those animation videos you have been watching? Then this is the right article for you to start with.
Few arts have taken over the world and completely redefined a genre as animation. From the old school style of drawing by hand, we are now almost purely using computer generated digital images to create amazing cinematic experiences that are diverse enough to be feature length movies, short films, or commercials.
If you have a vested interested in the art of animation, then this guide is a great place to start. We will give you some headers on how you can learn animation with no background in it whatsoever.
Keep in mind that this guide will only get you off the ground. To truly hone your skills in animation, the only way you can do it is to consistently practice and improve yourself.
- 3D modeling
The first step is to learn how to sculpt. Sculpting doesn’t require you to use clay or stone, with the online tools available, you can learn to sculpt on your computer. This is known as 3D modeling.
Modeling a 3D character or object is a great place to start. Before you can begin to animate, it’s best to create something to animate. It can be anything like a person, an animal or vehicles. Start with something easier, like a soccer ball. Then try to sculpt something more complex with intricate features. Sculpting is just like drawing, it takes time and practice and the more you do it, the better you become at it.
- Animation
Once you have made something, it’s time to add motion to it and bring it to life. Many easy to use tools online are freely available so choose liberally.
Learning to animate a 3D model is just like making a flip book. You make poses frame by frame and then play them out to have act of moving. But in animation software, there are much easier techniques of quickly putting together a motion called ‘key framing’ which takes targeting motions over a duration of time, then melds them together into a fluid movement.
- Editing and composition
Once you have made an animation, it’s time to start putting it together into a video. This process can be done using any open source video editing tools. Some animation cuts may require splicing different angles together to be a good scene. Otherwise, experiment what you like.
During this, add the sound to give your animated videos more life. Add sounds of the world to objects interacting, a background sound, and maybe even some music.
- Rendering the final film
Once you have made something that pleases you, go ahead and render it. Rendering is the process of creating the final version with all the cumulative effects put together. Rending is very performance intensive and as a result, can take some time if you are using a less than a powerful computer.
When you are rendering, you can choose one of many formats. This is a crucial step to select the format that’s right for you. Formats such as .mp4 will give you the maximum quality, but the size of your final film will be huge and the rendering will take some time. You can look to alternate formats like .mkv which are large resource greedy but still maintain a good quality.
It all depends on what kind of animated video you have created and where you plan to post it.
