'Developing Your 2D Eye!' by Mike Walling

Often times, when an animator animates in 3D, he/she does the contact poses and breakdowns, and the inbetweens are being handled by the computer. The animator then spends time to fix the floaty in-betweens and the overshoots. If the result looks good, the animator has a tendency to move on to the next shot. However, I find that the result tends to be mediocre at best, especially after the project is long over and I have a fresh eye to look at it again.

The reason is that the computer smoothes out everything. It does not have the ability to think about the spacing as an animator would. Therefore, it is important to learn how a 2D animator works. The excerpt below is from Mike Walling:

When a 2d animator does his scene he has to draw every frame. Every frame he draws has to be perfectly spaced, timed and drawn to make the scene work and the motion smooth. When most 3d animators do their scenes they pose out the character and figure out the spacing and workout all of the antics and so fourth, BUT they do one thing that could potentially make their scene weak. They let the computer do a majority of the imbetweening. What Mike was talking about in my review was me taking the time to look at every frame and making sure that there was a readable appealing pose. Not just letting the computer do the work but touching every frame much as a 2d animator would have to.

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