Animation in CG is like Under Water Spaghetti

 At this point, my fellow fourth years and I are all madly trying to get our animation finished. What I find interesting (in a horrible way) are the different and unique problems my friends and I are running into based on the different methods of animation we have picked for our thesis projects. For the record none of them are easy.  Animation, whether it is stop motion, flash, traditional paper and pencil, or CG are all difficult and have problems exclusive to that type.

The exclusive problem in CG is what I like to call underwater spaghetti.

Yep

Underwater spaghetti

I’ll start with underwater.

In CG animation you start with the main poses (key poses) of the scene. Next you work on the in-betweens, the movement to get from one key pose to the next.

To get the in-betweens, I flip a switch and the computer program fills in all the animation between the key poses.

 True story

Awesome! What an age we live in where the computer does all of the work for me.

NO!!!!

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!

NO!

(If you imagined me yelling all those noes in a loud and frustrated manner with rage evident in my tone, then you are imagining it accurately)  (Them’s fighting words, boy!)

It is true that the program will fill in the poses for you, but it will look like VOMIT!

It is the worst part when animating in CG,

cuz it was looking good

then the computer got involved 
now everything looks the worst floatyweirdunderwatermechanicalcoldgarbage you have ever seen!

The computer will make all the movement look underwater like. Hence the “Underwater” part of the title to this blog posts.

From this point forward, all my time and energy is spent trying to fix the computer’s animation.

I will fix it in the Spaghetti zone, better known as the Graph editor. (The “Spaghetti” part of the title)

It just looks like spaghetti to me, or like a sewing box where all the thread has become tangled, or just a giant hot mess of work.  

Spaghetti

I will go in noodle by noodle until I have final fixed the animation the computer program so “conveniently” did for me.

Noodle by noodle

As a film progress update, I am currently about 2/3 done my animation and am working like a mad lady to get it done as soon as possible.

Anyways here is some animation I have been working on.

Still looks too underwater like. Goddamn you, computer, Goddamn.