Transcripts
1. Introduction: The thing that I love so much about doing animation
every day as a job is I get to get
up every day and play. I don't really get to work. Hi, my name is Madison Erwin
and I am a 3D animator. You may have seen
some of my work on the latest
Spider-Verse movie. I've also worked for
a few Marvel films, including the series I Am Groot, and I just started learning
animation three years ago. This class is the
class that I wish I had when I was first
learning animation. At this point, you
know that you want to get into the
world of animation. You know that you love it, but you're trying to figure
out where do you fall. That's what this class
is designed to do. We're going to do some
journaling problems to show you what different genres
of animation there are, the different pipelines, the different roles
within those pipelines, figuring out what your spark is, and finding a role
that suits you best. It's that spark that's going to keep you going
and it's going to keep your interest of animation alive throughout your career, and it's going to
make it a sustainable endeavor instead of getting burned out early,
you're just interested. This is the most
exciting part of your journey because
you're learning, you're getting
interested in something, and you're finding that
thing where you're like, oh, that thing, I could waste
hours into that thing. At the end of this
class, you are going to have a dedicated career goal. You're going to be able to
dive into it headfirst and feel confident knowing that it's something that you want
to do for a long time. I'm so excited that
you've joined this class, so let's go ahead, jump
in and get started.
2. Find Your Why: Welcome to this class. Today we are going to be going over all the different parts of the wonderful world
of 3D animation, different parts of the pipeline, different genres of the
pipeline that you can get into, and just all the different
roles that you can find yourself in
with 3D animation. All you're going to need for
this class is a journal, a pen, and a sense
of creativity. For these journal prompts, the biggest thing that
I want you to go in with your mindset is, don't be married to
any idea of animation. Any preconceived
notions you have about animation, throw
them out the window. We're going to be doing
something different. We're going to be learning about all kinds of different
parts of the pipeline, and you may find yourself
really interested in something that you had
never even considered before. Just try to have an
open mind in this because you never know what is going to really
ignite that spark in. The first thing that I want
you to do is think about why. Why do you want to
get into animation? Do you have a specific
goal in mind? Do you have a vision of some
place that you want to be in the industry
years down the line? Or do you want to
run your own studio? Do you want to work
for a specific studio? It's really important
to nail down the why you want to
get into animation because that's what's
gonna keep you going and keep longevity
through this entire creative journey of
learning animation. When I was first starting
to learn animation, I had a journal just like this. I cracked open a new one. It was a lot uglier
than this one because I just grabbed
whatever was close to me. So my why was I want to work at a big studio. That was it. I had a specific studio
in mind and I thought, that's the dream, I want to work for
that studio one day, I'll be happy. Then as time went on, I started doing what we're
about to do in this class, of going over the different
parts of the pipeline. I learned more about different
aspects, and it changed. It was still something
I wanted to do. I wanted to work for
a big studio one day, but my why changed from I want to work into
a big studio into I want to animate life. That was my big why. I thought that was so fun
to capture these moments that either were realistic
or very unrealistic and put those into
something that was kind of immortal because
it was out there, it was for everyone to
see, it was accessible. But that's what my
why changed from, just from doing what we're
about to do in this class. So I'd love you to write down
what your first intuition, what's your why right now before you start learning about different parts of the pipeline. Then we're going to come
back at the very end and see if your why is changed. Some different reasons
for why could be anything but some common ones could be, "I just think it sounds cool. Animation sounds
cool, it looks cool. I want to be involved."
That's totally fine. Or maybe you have a really specific niche
that you're like, "I want to work on the next
movie of this studio is doing because I want to be in this specific department
doing this thing." My why specifically, when
I was first starting to learn animation was
very goal oriented. I didn't feel like I was
going to be successful until I completed this goal. But then as I started
researching more about animation and the different parts of the
pipeline I could get into, I realized it turned more into a philosophy rather
than a specific goal, and that's why I think I've had a lot of longevity and has
been able to do animation and learn animation
in such a short time, because it ended up turning into something
that's a lot more sustainable and sparks
me every day versus, "If I got to this big
studio, then what?" Maybe your why is
gone at that point. But that doesn't mean
to say that this is a bad why or
this is a good why. They can very much
be interchangeable, but that's the specific
reason that mine changed, and you might see that
happen to yours too. Maybe you are looking at
this and you're thinking, I don't really have a why. I just kind of heard about animation and am
looking into it. That's your why, interest. You're interested in it, and I think that is a
perfectly acceptable why, and that's why we're going to
come back and revisit this. Now that we've established what we're going to be
covering in this lesson and what we're going
to be thinking about, go sit down somewhere,
grab your notebook. Grab your pen. Really
think about it. Reflect of what you
like about animation. Write your first why. After you have your why, let's go to the next
lesson and figure out where does your spark lie in
the world of 3D animation. Where we're going to overview the whole animation pipelines, all of them because
there's multiple, and find where your spark will lead you in a role in animation.
3. Understand the 3D Animation Pipeline: In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through a very generic animation pipeline that can fit in any
genre of animation, and we're going to see what
interests you about it, what specific part
of that pipeline is going to spark that joy in you that you can run with later. A pipeline in regards to
animation is a system, a pipe of like a linear
kind of system of how things need to move to get
a project from a script, idea to final product
that's out into the world. The first thing that
we're going to do is find the generic pipeline. A generic pipeline is always
going to start out with an idea, an idea/story. This is where you have your
concept stage, obviously, this is what you're
trying to think of, your idea/story,
whatever it may be. This is going to start any project that you're
ever working on. This is not
necessarily a 3D art, but this is very crucial to any 3D project that
you're ever working on. Getting more into the
3D side of things. After you have your
idea and your story, usually you're going to
go through something called concept design. This, a lot of times
will start off as a 2D thing where people
will be drawing, you know, illustrating different
kinds of characters, sets, environments, everything that you need
to tell your story. This is kind of where the
birthplace of that is. A lot of times in concept
there might be 3D concept, so this leads into our next
part which is modeling. Modeling can have
character modeling and then environment modeling, which are two kind of
subsets of modeling. So environment, that's
someone that's making, oh, I have this idea
for a short film where someone walks
into a bake shop. The bake shop doesn't exist, so someone has to model that. So they have to sit
there and make it like a set in a film or
something else, and that's done with 3D clay. So character modeling,
the same thing, they're going to model the character that
they've come up with, the concept and
the designs about, and they're going
to make that into a 3D physical digital asset that can further be pushed down the pipeline to be
animated later. After modeling comes
something called texturing. Texturing is where we take this model and it's going to be this gray model that doesn't
have any colors on it, doesn't have any materials, it's just great, it
looks like clay. Then they're taking it to another department that's
going to either texture it, so they're going to give
it different materials. If you have a character that needs to have a gold necklace, someone needs to make
that necklace piece gold, and they need to
make it reflect. Because it needs
to be reflective whenever the character
is moving around. This is a place where you're also going to paint
the characters. You're making a skin texture, you're just making
it look alive. A lot of modelers will also do a lot of their own
basic texturing, but once you get
into bigger kind of studios or corporations that they will have usually separate departments for
both of these things. After we've gone through
modeling and text screen, the asset will next
go to rigging. This is where we take
whatever we've modeled, so usually this happens
to be a character. That's the most common
form of rigging. It will be character rigging,
so you get a character, you get the T-pose
of the character. It's just solid clay, It's digital clay.
It can't move yet. So what we need to do is
go in and put joints in it and put controls together so that we can
move this character. Instead of just being static, we can actually move
the character around. The next part, which
I may be biased, but it is my favorite
part, is animation. Animation can encapsulate
several different things, and this is the
part that a lot of people when you say I want
to get into animation, they think that
you're an animator, which is what I ended
up getting into. That's my niche,
that's my spark. But animation is where we're
bringing characters to life. We're bringing sets to life. We can bring anything to life, and we're just making it move. We're breathing life into it. After animation, we'll be animating something we
send it down the pipeline. The next it goes to is CFX. This is the department
that will be taking the clothes that
the character has on and actually making them
look like cloth or they have maybe when
we're animating them, they have what looks
like a helmet of hair and then the CFX department will take that and they
will make the hair look like it's individual
strands that are moving. Now, this is also
a really cool part of the pipeline because this is a very technical part
of the pipeline. There's a lot of
equations involved. You know, you're trying to
see how gravity would work on different kinds of materials
or different sorts of velocities or viscosities
of things so it's a very technical
part of the pipeline that is very much
grounded in reality. A lot of times you're trying
to make things behave in a certain way that's simulated and not specifically animated. So sometimes animation and CFX are very work,
very close together. Because let's say
I'm an animator, I've just animated a
character getting into bed, so they have to pull
up a big blanket. Now I might animate them
pulling up the blanket, but the CFX artist is
going to take it and make sure that the blanket looks like the whole thing is moving. Because if I had to move every little fabric of the blanket, I'd be there for a long time. So after CFX artist
is working on it, sometimes these two
things happen in tandem. It just depends on the studio,
depends on the artist. But usually what happens
next is lighting. Lighting is when we take all of this that has
already been done, the characters in the scene,
there's an environment, it's pretty, there's
nice colors and then what's going to
happen is someone is going to light the scene. Imagine that you have
just a dark room, there's no lights, and you need it to look like
a sunny afternoon. A lighter is going
to go in and put in fake 3D lights and it's going to simulate like
what a sun would be like, what the clouds would be like reflecting on the
face of the character, or maybe a car passes
and you can see the headlights or the window of the shop that the
person's walking past is reflecting the different lights
that are around the city. Because when we are working from concept all the
way down to CFX, usually we're working in what would be considered
the viewport. If you're working in blender, what you've seen in the
viewport when you're animating. Usually, it can look good, but usually, it
looks pretty flat. You know, it's not very lit, it doesn't have life in it. You're not seeing super shiny
glasses on your character. Once it gets to
lighting, that's when you really start to see
the beauty of like, oh, it feels alive.
Now there's materials. Maybe the lips look like their actual lip texture
instead of just painted on. Maybe the skin actually
looks a little translucent whenever
they move around. Lighting really brings life
into a character and is an animator's best
friend because it hides a lot of things that
we mess up in animation. So lighters, always
your best friend. Always good to have a
lighter on your side, so after lighting marketing. This is something
I didn't even know until relatively
embarrassingly recently, that marketing is a
huge part of a lot of different pipelines
because once you have all these things done after it's gone through
lighting rendering, which this can also
be called rendering, It's pretty much a final
product at that point and usually with a
film or video game, or even especially
even with creating your own digital
assets to sell on a marketplace or something
you need to market it. I worked before on
a feature film, didn't know that marketing
was really even a thing, you know it's a
thing but you don't really think about it until you're actually in it and then I got to see some
of my work I did. I had to pose some characters out and I saw
them on a popcorn bucket. I'm like, that's really
cool and really weird. That's a kind of a fun part
about animation that's kind of a specialized
thing and is interesting, kind of encapsulates all of the different parts
of the pipeline. But it's kind of its
own little offshoot, going through these different
parts of the pipeline. Just think about the fact
that there are people and roles behind every
single one of these. Different parts of the
pipeline are going to attract different types
of personalities and people and whatever
you're interested in that usually drives you towards a specific part of the pipeline. For example, maybe you're
a big ideas person. You like figuring out a story, problem-solving
issues in your story, or an idea for like a
product that doesn't exist, that could be you, or
a concept designer. Someone is very
interested in taking that ideas part of the pipeline and then
seeing it in reality. Instead of just
coming up with ideas, you're actually
testing them out. Modeling is a lot of times attracted to people that
really love sculpting. You know, if you've ever
worked with clay or Plato, it's very much like that, but you're doing it digitally. Texturing, it could
be for people that really love painting,
they love illustration. You know it's painting
over a 3D model. Maybe both of those things
sound interesting to you. Maybe you're like,
oh, I really want to sculpt a character and
then I want to make sure that they have all the
colors right and I want to color their shirt and
their hair and their skin. Rigging is for people that
are very technically minded. It's very similar to
puppetry or if you've ever seen someone that's worked
in stop motion before, all the characters
have an armature. You know where they can
move around and it's a very technical
mathematical art. Animation as if you're
insane like me and you just love making things move and
you love telling stories. Maybe you really love acting. That's something for me that really brought me
towards animation. Just thought that's so fun
to be an actor for anything. I can be a super tall guy, that's like super burly Viking, or I can be like a
petite little girl, like fairy, or I can be a dog, or you know, you
can be anything. CFX is also kind of similar to rigging in terms of it's
a very technical skill, but also you have
to have a lot of artistry with it.
Lighting and rendering. Maybe you love lighting, maybe you love making
things look very lifelike. I think that's a really
interesting part about lighting is you
get to play around with making these characters kind of come to light
and then marketing, if you're just kind
of interested, and one of these things. But maybe you kind
of want to do it all a little bit and think
it's cool when you're like walking through
Target and you see one of the toy boxes
of a film you worked on, and you see a character on,
it's like that's so cool. You never know what you're
going to be able to find, so that's kind of
just a basic overview of what a generic
pipeline will be. What I want you to do now is break out your journal again and I want you to really think about all these parts of the pipeline that we
just talked about. What I did when I
was first learning animation is I did exactly this. I wrote everything down and then I picked three that
really stood out to me. I want you to do the same thing, so for me specifically, I was like you know what,
sounds really cool, modeling, and then animation,
that sounds really cool. That could be something
I'm interested in, and then lighting, maybe? Lighting. I wasn't super
interested in lighting, but I was like, I think I
could be interested in it. So I want you to sit in your journal and
I want you to write down three parts of
the animation pipeline that you feel like either, I'm definitely
interested in that, or I could be that sounds
like something that matches my prior skills or something I'm
previously doing. Take those three things,
write them down, and then I'm sending you
on a research mission. If these are your three
things, I want you to search in Linked in Instagram, any kind of social media
you can get your hands on. Even do a Google search. Research, 3D modeling, and
usually when you research something a little more
narrowed down than just 3D animation, you're
going to find artists. Top artists are going
to show up that are industry specialists
in their field, and you're going to be able to study their stuff and think of, why do I like this model
that this person did? Or that's cool or I don't
really like that one as much. I did this when I
was first learning animation and I've researched
modeling and I thought, it's really cool when
they like sculpted. I've always loved clay. Maybe that would be
something I'm interested in, and then I researched
animation and I was, that's my thing and I
barely even researched lighting after that because I thought animation was so cool. I definitely knew that
that was my spark. So that's what I
want you to go do. I want you to look at
these three things and find which one really
sparks something in you. So in the next lesson,
we're going to cover the different
genres of animation.
4. Explore Speciality Pipelines: Last lesson we talked about the generic pipeline that
follows a similar thread, but now we're going to be taking that generic pipeline
and seeing where it fits in the different
genres of animation. For this lesson, we're
specifically going to talk about three
different pipelines, that is feature
animation, movies, film, and then video games, and then we're going to
talk about asset creation. Maybe you really love animation, you want to be an animator, but you could also
be an animator in feature film or you can do be an animator in video games or you can be an animator
working with assets, making assets that people
can animate themselves. It just depends on what
genre you want to get into, but you can take whatever we figured out in the last lesson, whatever you wrote
down in your journal. We're going to take those three things and see how they fit within these different
genres of animation. The first genre that we're
going to talk about, and one that is very
near and dear to my heart specifically
is feature film. The biggest thing
that I would say that differs about this
pipeline, again, taking that same
generic pipeline, everything's going to fit
into future film with that, but it is a huge endeavor. It is very collaborative. That is its own
thing. It is a beast. You're going to need a lot of production and coordinators, and lots of back end just to help get the project moving, because depending on the
scope of the feature film, you can have upwards
of 100 plus animators. That's just animation, not counting modelers
or any other part of the pipeline that
we talked about in the generic pipeline. It's much more of a broad scope with animation and feature film. If you're thinking
about I really want to be a modeler and I just want to work by
myself and I want to take something all the
way through the pipeline, feature film may not be for you because it is such a
collaborative thing. You have to be able
to work with people, you can't just isolate yourself, you really have to be not
necessarily a people person. You can be more introverted, but you just need to be
able to collaborate, you need to be able
to give feedback, take feedback
really, really well, because that's going to be
90% of your day to day work. The next genre is video games. With video games specifically, there's a lot of variables to
each part of the pipeline. For example, an animation. As an animator and a
video game studio, there's cinematics
animators which are just working on the
cut scenes that you see in a video game whenever
you're playing through and the thing that people sometimes
will skip if you want to, but you can watch and watch the narrative and the story unfold. That's a different
type of animator versus a gameplay animator. That's going to be an animator that is animating the character, running around,
jumping, ducking, attacks, different things
like that, dodging. Those are two different
types of animation, but within the same pipeline. Also, another part of a video
game pipeline is modeling. When it comes to modeling, there's character
modeling, of course. Environment modeling
is huge because your characters
always have to be interacting with
the environment, and sometimes in
future animation, your character really doesn't interact with the
environment at all. They can, but they're
not going to be driven by a player that's
running around exploring. If I'm doing a shot
in future film, my character can never
touch something and it's totally just a flat
image in the back. But with video game, you have to make sure that
everything's cohesive, everything's working
together because the player is the director
at the end of the day. Then another part to video game genre of the pipeline is a
lot of play testing. There's a lot of trying
to figure out if what you animated or
what you modeled, what you lit, what you textured
doesn't work in the game. You actually have to put
it in the game engine and play through
and make sure that your animation isn't
clipping through the ground and the characters falling
all over the place. Or your model doesn't work, because now all of a
sudden your character is a little itty bitty and
the model's too big. You have to really
check everything. There's a lot of cross
referencing that goes into the video game genre. The third genre of the animation pipeline I
would say is asset creation. Asset creation is making props, models, environments, any asset that you can sell
on the digital marketplace. Instead of selling
it at a store front, you are selling it on a digital storefront where
you're giving people digital products that you are giving them licenses to use, to be able to use in
their own projects, to be able to use in
their own video games, own short films, or if they just want to play around
something as a student. You take that generic
animation pipeline and the only thing about
asset that's a bit different is it can
be a solo endeavor. Maybe you specifically want to create your own
assets for animation, maybe you want to
create a character all the way from step 1, from the idea I want to create this character to the final, which is the character is
now available to sell. I have my own thing on the
side where I work on this, just as a passion project
that I love doing. It's a group of friends
I've had for a while, we're all animators and we
all work on assets together. We all have our
different strengths, which is a good part, for instance, with
my group that we create assets for animators. We create characters
that you can rig and they're animatable and
students can use them, people that are industry
professionals can use them, anybody can use them, so we have to do a lot
of animation testing. We have to make sure that
the character can move, we need to do test, we
need to animate it, just make sure that everything's working so that way
it can be animated. But if you're just
wanting to make a prop, let's say you want to model
an environment and sell it. You want to model a little
city street and sell it. You're not going to have
to do animation testing on that because it's
not a rigged character. It just depends, that's when
the pipeline can change. You can remove parts of the generic pipeline when
it comes to asset creation, but it's all asset dependent. Let's go ahead and summarize the key points that I've covered about these different genres
of the animation pipelines. First one, we have feature film. Feature film. The specific things about this pipeline that
are going to be different from the generic
pipeline is collab. This one is huge about Collab. You can't do this solo, you have to be a people person. The other thing
that you have to be is used to tight deadlines. That's a big thing
that happens in film a lot of times is
you're working OT. It's very exciting, but deadlines are a huge
thing in feature film. Another one is video games. With video games, remember if you're making any
asset, animation, any part of the
pipeline needs to look good from every angle. Another important part is
the player is the director. You're not in charge of cameras, it is up to the player figuring
out what things go where. Player is director.
That's a big part of it. Asset creation, that is the next part of the genres of animation that
we talked about. The big thing about asset creation is it could be
a collab or it can be solo. Could be either,
depending on what assets you want to create. Another thing about that is parts of the generic
pipeline can be removed. Sometimes you're going
to be able to make a model that doesn't need
to be animated ever. Maybe it's not even rigged, so maybe you can
take rigging and animation out of your
pipeline experience. Now that we've talked about these three different genres of different parts of animation in the industry that
you can get into, I want you to take one of them that you're
really interested in, that you're like,
I could do that. Feature film sounds cool, or I want to work alone, I want to do my own assets, research, research
mission again. I want you to go and research either something that
you've seen before, I think is a really
helpful way to research. When I was looking into this
and I knew that there were different aspects and
different genres of animation, I went and researched
feature film. I went and watched some old
animated films that I loved. I was looking at them
with a new eye of like, I really liked animation and I like this feature film.,
that's really cool. I can see how the
characters moving now, I'm really paying
attention to that. Or if you're really interested
in something with games, maybe go back and play
your favorite game. Maybe you're walking around as the character and you see
really cool environment, and you think, someone
had to sculpt that. How did the person sculpt that? Do I like the way
that tree looks? Or is that tree look weird? You got to look and see what
these different parts of the pipeline and the
different genres with a fresh perspective and a fresh eye really helps you narrow down the things that you like about it, the
things that you don't. It's a good way to
start training your eye artistically and technically
at this point too. Even if you don't
know specifically why it looks good or bad, I want you to go back, watch
a film, play a video game, or even go on a market
place and try to just see and observe what
things you like, what things you don't, and
same thing in your journal. I want you to write them down. Just write down your
observations notes. I'm huge on note taking,
as you can tell, and it's a good
thing to be able to look back on, reflect later. Meet me in the next lesson where we're going to break down the steps of how to get
into your chosen genre.
5. Navigate the Learning Curve: Welcome back. We are going to go in and
we're going to start breaking down realistic ways that we're going to get to you, to your niche and the genre and the pipeline that you've chosen that you're
really interested in. Whatever sparked you, we're
going to break it down into realistic steps and
just tips and tricks, things I wish I would
have learned to get yourself up and running
into a career in animation. One of the first things I
just want to say that is an important thing to remember is we're going to write
it down. Say it with me. Software is your friend. That is very important. It'll be your enemy
for the most of the times that you're
starting to learn animation. Anything dealing with 3D, the software is the most
horrible part in my opinion. In a lot of people's opinion, the drop off I've seen of
people that are trying to learn some genre
of 3D animation, it falls off by like
week 3 of them trying to learn simply because Blender
is so hard to navigate. Or it's just there's too many windows, I don't
know what's going on, I don't know how to click, I don't know how to
like grab something. It's super overwhelming. The most important
thing is not fight it. You're going to have
to learn the software and there's this
really difficult part where your artistic ability
and just intuition of, oh, the things in my
head that I need to do is not going to match
your technical ability. You're going to start with
your technical ability at a zero and your artistic
ability is going to be here. You're just going to be
constantly struggling to meet that and try
to get to level out. Ideally, you want it
to always be like stepping up with each
other throughout your entire learning journey. But for right now, when
you're first starting out, make friends with the software
that you're dealing with. Don't try to fight it, but also just take it in baby steps. Being able to start now
making your software, your friend, now your enemy. Learning the basic
foundations that are going to set up a
good workflow for you later in life is the key to this pivotal point in your
animation learning career. The next thing that I would
say is find your niche. Remember when we wrote down three things in our journal
that we were interested in? We're going to stick with those. You're not about to go
gallivanting off into the sunset with all
the different parts of the animation pipeline. Because although you can learn different parts of
the animation pipeline, and it's helpful, it's really important to
stick with your niche. Or at least try to
keep it narrowed down to like those three
things or two things. Ideally one thing that
you're really interested in that really sparks joy because
you can't learn it all. You're going to be able to
dedicate more time and have a much higher growth of your animation journey
when you find your niche, and you stick to it versus bouncing around all
over the place. If you know a little bit about
animation, you might say, Madison, I want to be a
generalist. Totally fine. That's a very separate
thing where if you want to learn a bit about every part of the
animation pipeline that we talked about, that's
definitely doable. But you can't just expect to get really good overnight because
that's a lot of steps. Start off learning something that you're really
passionate about. The next thing that I
want to talk about, very important to this day, I still am so happy that I
did this when I was first starting out learning
animation is good habits. You need to make good habits now so that way you don't burn out and you aren't
just frustrated with the software later. An example of this might
be you're trying to learn blender for the
first time and it's overwhelming. There's
so much going on. You get frustrated because
you're just trying to make a simple something and nothing's working and the software is like messing up and you're
clicking the wrong things. Give yourself only 10
minutes at a time. Then you make sure you say, I'm going to make a
habit of, I work for, let's say 30 minutes and I go take a two minute
break somewhere, or I take a one minute break. I walk around, I'd get up
from my chair, I take a walk. Whatever you can do to
make sure to instill these habits now so
you're not running yourself into the ground
and running yourself into really bad frustrations later that could be easily avoided. If I could circle this a
million times, I could. Because this is so
important for your career going forward and just
in life in general. The next thing that we're
going to talk about is our tried and true Blender. Blender is a great
resource, it is free. I used Blender when I
first learned animation, I used some very
rudimentary courses online that were very simple. But just Gana gave me a taste of a little bit of everything
that I was interested in, in the animation pipeline. I took a modeling
course for Blender. I took a lighting
course, and I took an animation course and animation
was the one that stuck. Blender is a great resource
to have, to be able to learn, to really play around
with all these different aspects
of the pipeline without wasting tons of money on something that you
don't need right now. Right now, you just
need to know, could I do this? Would
I even like this? That being said about Blender, do not get attached to it and
you need to be adaptable. That's the biggest thing, is it is a great resource to have. But like any software,
as any artist, you want to have basic
foundational skills that can translate
to anything else. I started on Blender,
It was incredible. I'm so glad that it exists, but I've used a lot of
other animation software. Maya Auto Desk is like the biggest software that a lot of big studios or projects, video game companies, everybody uses some version of
Maya or like Rumba. I mean, there's a
lot of different animation softwares out there. Although you're learning Blender and it's a great place to start, make sure that you're
not married to it. You step back a little
bit and you're not thinking as soon as you get out and like
get your first job, you're like, oh,
where's Blender? This isn't the same thing,
it doesn't look the same. You need to be
adaptable. That also ties into what we were talking
about with good habits. If you're setting up good
workflow habits and you're learning in the right way
and have the right mindset, you're going to be able to take all these skills
that you're going to learn from a great
resource which is Blender. Then you're going to be
able to translate those later into any other software
that you might need. Blender, good, but be adaptable. What I want you to
do now is go into your journal and I want
you to write down and come up with a plan of
how are you going to make these study habits and this
learning curve effective. How are you going to commit to, I'm going to learner. I'm going to try to teach
myself blender every day after work for 10 minutes.
Maybe 30 minutes. If you're feeling
adventurous, maybe an hour depends
on how much time. Find it adaptable to your life. But try to find a schedule
that fits with you and your, something that you can
do realistically too. Writing that down and having
a good schedule in mind, or at least just
a few guidelines for yourself to
be able to learn. Animation is really going to help with that
learning curve because it's much more manageable to sit down at the
computer and say, okay, I'm going to
practice Blender. I'm going to learn, I'm going
to study for 30 minutes. That's a lot more manageable
to deal with than this infinite
amount of time that you just dedicated
to learning 3D. That just is never ending, which can be exciting but
also is not sustainable. A good example of
this might be okay. I have my three things that
I'm really interested in. I'm interested in animation,
lighting modeling. Take those, rank them by your most interested, to
your least interested. Mine was animation modeling
and then lighting I was like, okay, so for animation
I'm going to just view like a few
courses about it. Just dabble, nothing serious. But I'm going to do
this for a little bit. I'm just going to learn about what is out there in animation. I gave myself like a week
where I could do that. Research one of those for a week if you really
like it and you're like, oh, I want to learn
more about that. Invest in a course,
invest in something else that is a little
bit more in depth. Then commit to that
for two weeks, three weeks, however long
the course takes to finish. Then I'm going to move on to my next part of the pipeline
that I'm interested in. If I was going through animation, I'm really
not feeling it. Maybe I'm going to
commit to it for two weeks and then
still not feeling it? I'm going to move
to modeling and I'm going to move to
lighting. Same thing. You're going to
rinse and repeat for those same steps and
see what really fits you and make sure that you're committing to things that were you're not jumping
ship too early on. Something that you
might have enjoyed if you'd just stuck it
out for a little bit. Well, go ahead, write out your
schedule in your journal. Once you've done that, come back and meet me in
the next lesson, and we're going
to talk about how to survive the overwhelm.
6. Survive Overwhelm: Now, we've figured out the different part of the
pipeline we want to work in, maybe we've been
learning for a while, we've set ourselves dates, we've figured out deadlines. We've started to
learn more about animation and the niche that we're wanting to follow into. Starting to get overwhelmed now. Maybe it's been a few weeks, maybe it's been a few months, and you're learning and you feel like
you're progressing, but maybe it still just feels so much that you
have yet to learn. I remember going
to that point in my animation learning journey at the same time
where it was like, oh, I'm like having fun
and I'm learning things. It's not that the spark dies off, but it's
more just like, oh, it's getting a lot and now there's
even more to learn. What we're going to do
now is I'm going to give you three basic tips that
I wish someone would have told me of how
to be able to survive this overwhelming period
in learning animation. The first thing is, don't rush. Take a breath, you're
going to be okay. That's my biggest advice to you. I think a lot of times we want to speedrun the
animation process, it's more about the goal of that big Y we talked about
in the very beginning of, oh, I really want to work for this studio or I want
to do this thing, or I want to get to
animation because of this reason, you
rush towards it. It's like this
cheese at the end of the maze where you're
so excited to get to that point that you're
not taking a moment to enjoy the journey
as cheesy as it is. But this is the only time
where you can really dedicate 24/7 of your creative time to animation and just learning. Don't rush it, that's
my first big tip. Don't rush, take your time. My next big tip for
when you're feeling overwhelmed is use
your resources. There are tons of resources
out there for inspiration, guidance, help, support, that's the big
things that you're going to be needing right now. Huge one is having a community, being able to find people
that are doing what you're doing because
it's no easy feat, you're learning animation,
that's a huge world, that's a huge thing to learn, so try to find other people that are doing the same
thing that you're doing, or have done it and
have been there and can relate to you
and cry with you, and be happy with you about it because it's a huge
thing to undertake. Have a community, have mentors, reach out to people,
pick their brain about animation and
why they got into it. A lot of this is just
getting yourself inspired to get out
of that overwhelm. What I do is I go and I
look for inspiration. I either watch some
favorite films that I've loved when I was growing up as a kid that got me
into animation, or I will go and
research online, I'll look up creators that
I know I love their work, other animators that I get really inspired
by seeing their work. Or sometimes just
leaving animation for a minute and going and doing something outside of animation, doing something physical,
going on a walk. In order to be in any
part of animation, you have to live a life
outside of animation. Because doing just animation, you're not going to be true to life if you're not
living the life. The next one on our list is use your resources. Very important. My third thing for surviving this overwhelming world of 3D, I'm so sorry, I'm going to have to say this,
show your work. You need to show it
to other people, you need to be able
to have feedback, you need to have
support through people, good and bad with your work. It's so scary, I know it was so scary for me
when I was first starting out in
animation because I felt like I had no
idea what I was doing. I was throwing stuff at the
wall and hoping it stuck. I had no idea. The only way that you're ever going
to be able to get better is by showing it to other
people that have been there and have more
skills than you do. It can be weird to have a critical eye on something
that's a creative work, especially if you're
not used to that. But you're going to, no matter
what part of the pipeline, what genre you're in, you're going to have to share
what you're creating. Start with that now
and get used to that because that's going to
be your life from now on. You're going to get
better by keeping all your stuff to yourself
and just hiding it away, you're going to want to
show it to people and get feedback and get
support too because people saying something good about your work goes a long way, especially when you're
first starting out and you admire the skills of the person that you're showing
your work to, so that can really
help dial down the overwhelmingness
of it because you know you're on the right track when you're getting
good feedback too, and you're showing your
work to other people. If you're getting the
go-ahead, or the, hey, you need to work on
this a little bit more and it can give you
a little bit more of a narrowed and clearer direction on what you need
to focus on next. The next thing that
I want you to do is go away from this,
grab your journal, and we're going to write
down three things that relate to the three bullet
points that we just covered. First one, not rushing. We're going to write down what
are the fundamentals that we want to learn now to set
ourselves up for success. We're not going to rush, how are we going to enjoy the journey? Writing down those fundamentals
that you really want to focus in on and make sure that
you're getting right now. Second thing, using
your resources. Who are your resources?
What are your resources? I want you to write
down something of like a resource guide so
you can go back and refer to it later of I want to look on LinkedIn or Instagram, or talk to these artists, or pick their brain whenever I'm feeling down or overwhelmed. Then the third thing
is showing your work. This is really important
to be able to know. Who are you going to
show your work to next? Is it going to be your
mom, your friends, people on LinkedIn that
you're posting to? I still show my work to my mom all the time and
I get her eyes on it and all those are very valuable to give you
feedback and direction. Now, you've just written a go-to guide and a plan book of how you're going to combat being overwhelmed with this
world of 3D animation.
7. Final Thoughts: Okay, congrats, You
finished the whole class. We've covered a
lot in this class. Everything from different
animation pipelines to different animation genres, to navigating the
learning curve, navigating the overwhelm. With all these things
that we've covered, I'm hoping that you walk away
knowing what your niche is, knowing how to utilize the skills and tips
and tricks that I gave you to be able to
move forward and get closer to making your
animation niche your career. If you remember, at the very
beginning of this class, we wrote down your big why of why you want
to get into animation. If you get to the end of
this class and your why has changed from what it was at
the beginning, that's okay. Now we're going to think of
why did your why change? Maybe at the beginning of this class it was more
broad and it was, I think animation is cool. Maybe now after talking about the different genres
and pipelines, maybe I have a really specific
why of I want to get into modeling because
I love sculpting and that looks so fun to me. Now your why's
changed a little bit. That's okay because now your why is going to propel
you forward into your animation learning
journey and really keep you in a sustainable path forward that you
can keep going on. I hope that you've
enjoyed this class. Please share all
your journals in the project gallery and I'd
love to see what you've completed and what your whys are and be able just to share
it with other students. It's been so great
teaching this class and I hope to see you
in my next class.
Madison Erwin, Animator
