Is character animation as easy as it looks with the daz3D platforms?

heisdavesjunk_077ddf219e

Hello

Im very new to 3D, but i am an anime enthusiast. It seems to me that once you were up to speed with the different daz platforms and built your character models, it would be pretty easy to kick out character animations using the facial expression program, lip sync program and the motion capture. And if you merged your characters with more traditional non 3d backgrounds, you couuld create a half hour of animation pretty quickly.  IS this not the case, is it more time and resource consuming than it appears? Because if it as easy as it looks everyone could make their own shows, but this must not be true considering all the anime studios closing their doors in japan due to high cost. 

 

larsmidnatt

Animation is always time consuming...Unless you like stock 3D animations that may look like poo. Motion capture manipulation is a skillset of it's own. Getting up to speed takes time and practice. 

I've been in animation since the early 2000's. Animation isn't as easy as it sounds. Even when tools are great and you have a great workflow, it takes time to make things look good.

And Japanese "Anime" is often that low budget, low FPS stuff. (low budget does not mean not enjoyable. Low budget, short run 12 episode anime allows for huge story and theme experiments that would never happen in a Disney film...)  A Japanese 2D animation is often about 8fps of animation! Several still frames that do nothing. They pay animators in Japan about 11k USD a year...yeah it's not something people want to do for that price. Hence many years of working with Korea for work, and Americans use Korea and Mexico for animation labor.

I've been watching Japanese animations since the 90's. They are the masters of LIMITED animation. It's a lot harder to implement limited animation concepts into 3D. Thats why their 3D stuff is limited to background characters, monsters, drones and stuff. 

There are a few animation studios in Japan that still do the high quality lots of frames 2D animations. But it's only for movies from big directors. Even stuff from the west is pretty cheap, but in Japan because they still crank out the most of it, they have refined the craft to bare minimal levels of work.

Custom animation, is expensive. If you want to use stock animations for walk cycles, dances and stuff it's not as bad. But that won't be very original or memorable now would it? I could make one of my characters do a dance in less than 1 minute, using stock assets. But it would not be worth much. (rendering that animation is a different story...that can take a lot of time)

It's actually really hard to animate a 3D character that looks as cute as a 2D one. For a lot of reasons. For one, that 2D character is not physically possible in 3D space...and they cheat a ton with proportions and movements when drawing them. Translating that to 3D hasn't reallly happened yet. The handful of 3D japanese animations I've seen look really bad..even if they got tons of praise. There is one anime this season that is 3D, and man the characters are stiff as all...2D animations morph from chibi, to normal, to super serious in just a few frames. Doing that in 3D is crazy hard.

Oh and I said a lot, sorry. But lastly, this isn't a Daz specific challenge. this is a challenge for all 3D artists and animatiors using any tools they have. Custom, unique animation is not cheap or fast. Many people who try it as a hobbyist learn the challenges and quit. In fact, most of the people I went to school with for animation bailed in the first year. It's that serious.