Comments

Antaro: Spoken like someone who isn't an animator. Not that I'm being snooty -- most people simply don't realize that technical details are a part of animation. It's not just about drawing pretty pictures. (This goes back to the earlier days of drawn animation, never mind CGI.) Little Timmy doesn't have to care about "physics and motions," but as Alejandro Garcia says in the article, people will notice bad physics even if they can't put their finger on why it's bad. A couple of examples: some of the first exercises that beginning animators go through in school are the bouncing ball and the walk cycle. They quickly learn that if they don't understand certain concepts about physics the ball or the character walking just won't look right. Gravity, acceleration and deceleration affect the ball's bounce; how the ball absorbs the impact of hitting the ground determines how it deforms to relay the idea of that impact to the viewer; and walking requires an understanding of centre of gravity and weight distribution. Get any of those things wrong and the audience will spot it right away. Creating animation isn't just anarchic whimsy, and physics isn't all about calculations on a blackboard. Even the wackiest cartoons you ever saw growing up depended on the animators' knowledge of how things move. Emru Townsend Editor, Frames Per Second www.fpsmagazine.com