Question #4
4) Explain some of the 'Cheat' proceedures.
-Steph Greenberg (Director/Laead Animator ACT !): What the camera appears to see is the only thing that counts. I encouraged people to "animate to the camera", and forget about what they would have done in real life space.
-Christopher Janney (Scene Planner): We used a 3D to do a 2D roll out of the road in ACT I.
-Rachel Levine (Assistant Animator): I used what was already made to make what was still needed. Meaning, I built a few character heads and then made more by building off these ones. Saves time.
-Mike Gasaway (Lead Animator ACT II): The biggest "cheat" I guess that I use a lot is trying to make sure that every frame is NOT perfect. What I mean by this is that traditional animation has an advantage right now over CGin the case where the character can be any length, weight, size, whatever-within reason in animation. In CG, we are limited to "this is the length of the arm" no matter where we put it. There are some squash/stretch techniques that can alter this but nowhere near as much freedom that traditional has. So, sometimes, in order to make a character gesture, an arm might go through a character's body. Or a foot might go through the floor for a frame. Because this happens only on one or even two frames, no one will ever notice.
-Patrick Lowery (Lead Animator ACT III): Cheat by using math and time relationships. I found cycles to be good starting points, since they worked well for the type of animation we were doing. Nothing major, just your standard offsets of keys to avoid twinning, get overlap, stuff like that.
-Doug Cooper (Technical Director): We used lots of cheats to integrate the 3D characters with 2D backgrounds. Many times characters were rendered in pieces (the torso an legs as one image, arms and head in another image), and composited together in front and behind elements in the 2D backgrounds to put them into the scenes. In some scenes, shadows are actual 3D "perfect" renderings, and in other scenes they're drawn mattes, or static overlays. In animation, everything's a cheat. It's all about making it look right, not doing it "the right way".
