A second pain I wish never to relive (Blender Animation Part 4: Keyframing)

The title is called a second pain because in my AS blog there's a post called 'A pain I wish never to relive'. This is basically the sequel to that.

Blender is very versatile. It can do a lot of things, but it also depends on your expertise and knowledge. When I say I've been using Blender for 2 years, I mean I've been using it on and off like once a month and sometimes when a big thing happens I use it a lot. And even then, I don't primarly use it for animation, just for stills or 3d models or things like that. I'm not a master, but I've learnt quite a bit.

HOOOOOO boy coming to this field, makes me feel like I've learnt nothing. My only experience with animation was, this one video. https://youtu.be/_C2ClFO3FAY

And here I was thinking HA! that's not so difficult!

(Well I did do an animation last year as reference for my AS project, for camera angles and stuff. But that was supposed to look terrible because it was just reference. And it had been a very long time since I actually did animation.)

It's been about a week and I've found some new information. Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, absolute masterpiece of a film. I haven't had the chance to watch Behind the Scenes of it but....apparently it was all animated by hand.

No motion capture suits were used.

I wouldn't feel comfortable looking up a top 10 list of the worst forms of torture but Hand Animations would make a good candidate for that list. Be it 2D or 3D.

This image above is the summary of all the data used in only 3 seconds of footage.

Each, bone, has rotation X, rotation Y, rotation Z, coordinate XYZ, scale XYZ, and probably a few more attributes.

And there's only about....a few dozen bones.

And every single one of those data points above has to be adjusted with a new value every second.

My computer is burning, and the worst part is, that's just to actually process the animations. They don't look good! At all! The graphs are all over the place and to actually make it look good you're supposed to go in and tweak individual points on those graph, maybe frame by frame. Individual coordinate adjustment, rotation adjustment, scale adjustment, frame by frame, of dozens of, maybe hundreds of bones.

It's just so much effort. At this point, making an animation isn't the hard part. If you're skilled you can do it pretty easily by just proper timing and poses. The hard part is making it look authentic. You'd think putting on a mocap suit would be easy but looking at some behind the scenes vids it still is a lot of effort to pull off.

Thus far in a week I've found out:

1) I have a lot to learn

2) I need a much stronger machine

3) I have a lot to learn
4) Using your head isn't very good for reference when poses are concerned
5) I have a lot to learn

6) 3D or 2D animation, no matter which one you choose, is an art. Art is a skill and takes years of practice to properly master. Just because one seems easier doesn't necessarily mean it is. The biggest challenge with 3D is making it look natural, because it can technically seem correct but if it's not all the way there then it's noticeable that it looks off.

7) I should give Source Filmmaker and Maya a try because there's a lot of people that animate in one of those two then render in Blender.

I don't even want to begin describing my process on how this animation got done. I'm in tears that it even looks this mediocre because originally it was so so bad. What I can do is summarize.

-Hair not linked to Vi, had to be adjusted frame by frame to fix

-Animation didn't look natural

-Shapekey problems, facial expressions bugged or caused clipping with hair.

-Light bleeds and artifacts with textures

-Missing shadows

-The rocks on the ground took like 7 hours to do because plugins gave problems and it needed to do physics calculations so I could actually spread them out.

-Could only tell what I was doing once rendered, too much lag in Blender to view real time. Kind of like the ancient ways of photos with films. You could only see what you made after the photo was taken.

-Renders took like 15 minutes and were the only way to actually see what I was doing

-Crashes, Crashes, Crashes, Crashes, and more crashes.

But it's done. It's not great but, it's usable. I had to use my brother's weaker machine to do it too and then bring everything over and fix the files but. It is done.

The newfound respect I have for 3D Animators after this is just, on a new scale entirely, and especially for the people who revolutionized 3D from Into The Spiderverse.

Actually, screw that. Not just 3D, but all forms of art. Be it cinematography, 2D, 3D, Painting, it all takes so much skill and effort.

I always knew that it required a lot of time and patience but there's a difference between knowing, and knowing the feeling, and today I've understood just how difficult of a job it is.