Bones And Frames

Bones & Frames

Animation Team Structure

• Animator definition: “When you say animation, they say, oh, you’re an animator, but for me, an animator is one subgroup of a large amount of people that work on a film”
• Team size: “You’re getting upwards of, you know, sometimes close to 100 people overall that are just working on building the character, and that’s before it gets into animation”

Asset Pipeline

3D Character Building Process

Asset Stage Foundation

• Initial phase: “You start in the asset stage, which is going to be your modelers, so building all of your characters, your environments in 3D”
• Rigging requirement: “You need to rig those, you need to add bones to your characters, make sure everything can move for the animation team”

3D Modeling Fundamentals

Model Structure

• Basic definition: “Ultimately, what a model is in 3D animation is a set of points”
• Process: “You are essentially mapping out a layout of a character’s body that has individual points”
• Connection system: “That then are connected by edges and then ultimately represent a polygon”
• Purpose: “So you’re basically laying out all of these kind of a map of how the geometry of the character will flow so that things will move correctly”

Mesh Development

• Critical component: “When you’re designing the model, the most important thing is figuring out how those individual vertices work together to build what’s called a mesh”
• Grid concept: “Which again is kind of like if you imagine if you put a grid layout on a person and you understood how things would intersect and the curvature so that you get things that can move and look believable”

Rigging Process

Definition

“Rigging basically takes a model and it puts the virtual bones inside of it to get it ready for an animator to animate”

Skeleton Layout

“You are laying out the skeleton to fit inside of the geometry. You’re not going to build every single bone that’s in the human body”

Digital Puppet Concept

• Puppet analogy: “If you think of it like a digital puppet, you kind of have those armature wires in those areas where things need to move”
• Similar process: “It’s a very similar process in 3D”

Binding and Skinning

• Technical process: “And then you do this process called binding or skinning where you are defining how when those joints and pieces of the skeleton move, how does that deform, stretch and compress the vertices of the model”
• Final handoff: “And then ultimately you pass that digital puppet to an animator and you give them a set of controls in the computer software that allow them to animate those joints that then drive the skin”

Animation Team Integration

• Animation phase: “The animation team then takes the rigged model and is able to make them act”

Look Development and Texturing

Texture Team Role

• Surface finishing: “Ultimately a look development team will texture those models and sort of add all of the bells and whistles, the fur, the cloth, the hair you see, that’s all done by a surfacing team or a texture team”

Note

Texture Importance “If you don’t texture things, you have a really boring world because just like in practical modeling, sculpting with clay, the finished product is gray and it’s just a flat gray color so there really isn’t a lot of life to it”

Texture Properties

• Color and light response: “So texture painting not only gives those objects color but it also determines how they respond to light. Are they shiny? Are they dull?”
• Surface feel: “We also determine with texturing how things feel. Is it rough? Is it smooth?”
• Facial details: “On a face it might be like adding more like linear details or like sketching details”

Visual Appeal Considerations

• Movement context: “These characters still have to be visually appealing. You know they just can’t be a collection of brush strokes. You’re not in a museum staring at something still”
• Dynamic viewing: “You’re looking at something that’s moving and talking”
• Artistic approach: “Coming to it as an artist generally will lead you in the right direction”

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Quiz Question: When an animator is talking about a 3D animated character’s “skeleton” or “bones,” they are referring to its

Answer Options:

• Mesh
• Polygon
• Rig ✓
• Shape

Quiz Summary

Skeleton/bones = Rig (the virtual bone structure for animation)

The 3D animation process involves multiple specialized teams working together to transform polygon-based models into fully animated characters through rigging, texturing, and animation phases. Rigging creates the digital skeleton that allows animators to bring static models to life with believable movement and deformation.