> Caveman Volume 4 - Storyboarding to Final Animation
Caveman Volume 4 - Storyboarding to Final Animation
Tutorial Details
In this in-depth tutorial on creating professional looking studio animations in Lightwave we take you through the complete process from storyboarding to the final animation. This is an amazing project for anyone with a love for animation as we cover the principles of animation, thumbnail sketching, storyboarding, 2D animation, key poses, in-between poses, lines of action and creating the full 3D animation in Lightwave.
Scene Setup for Animation in Lightwave (Parts 1 - 2)
We go through some of the features for animation in Lightwave including the dope track and dope sheet, create an additional interface tab for this specific project and bring in the fully rigged Caveman to set up the scene.
The Principles of Animation (Parts 3 - 4)
Here we look at the fundamental principles for how to animate and explain key poses, in-between poses and lines of action by creating some thumbnail sketches in Photoshop. We also go over some live footage of the type of movement we're trying to create to better define our poses and gain a deeper understanding.
Planning an Animation - Different Applications for Storyboarding an Animation (Part 5)
Demonstration of different applications that are used for storyboarding animations. We cover Plastic Animation Paper (PAP) and Mirage and explain the process of professional storyboarding and how to become a good animator by planning the animation. You don't need to have these applications to follow the tutorial and we've included our complete storyboards for this project.The focus in this part is to show you the importance of planning out an animation in 2D before setting it up in Lightwave the same way it would be done in a production environment.
Creating the Storyboard and Thumbnails - Key Poses and Animation Arches (Parts 6 - 7)
Here we create the rough storyboard for the Caveman animation in Mirage by defining our key poses and framing them up to help bring our animation to life.
Completing the Storyboard - Creating the In-Between and Break Down Poses (Part 8)
In this part we work on perfecting the complete 2D sequence by adding in-between poses and getting flow in the movement. We save out the complete sequence to use as a reference in Lightwave to base our animation on.
Setting up Key Poses in Lightwave & Creating the Line of Action (Parts 9 - 17)
Working with our rigged model we start off by setting up the key poses created in the storyboard. Gradually we add more poses following the storyboard frame by frame and try to capture the motion by setting keys and roughing out a basic animation. Here we focus on following the arches for movement and adding break down poses to refine the result, creating a soft animation curve and using the graph editor and dope sheet. We also look at some things to watch out for in animation such as over exaggerated poses that can give unrealistic results.
Refining the Animation & In-Between Poses (Parts 18 - 25)
Club pick up, relaxing movement, preventing stiffness in poses, locking down cameras, adjusting the timing for proper weight and tweaking of the in-between poses. In the graph editor we work on flattening tangents, smoothing out animation curves, cleaning up motion keys and adding some small details like the adding blinks to the eyes.
This is the final part of our Caveman series and comes with the fully rigged model that was created in the previous tutorials in this series. You can follow this as a separate project or start on volume one and create your very own Caveman from scratch. The other tutorials in this series can be found below;
