Great video! Worst advice I was given when I was starting out: don't use a lot of keys. The advice had good intent, the animator was explaining how he'd inherited a scene from another animator and the curves were a mess. But, the way I took it was use the most minimal amount of keys possible and my animation suffered because of it. I didn't have as many breakdowns, micro adjustments like slight weight shifts in the feet, because I thought I was using "too many keys". Lesson I eventually figured out: it's okay to use a lot of keys as long as you know the intent behind it. Also there's no set rule for too much or too little keys. I've heard of some animators who actually animate on 1's. If it's a fast action in a short amount of time, YES there will be a lot of keys. If you're baking keyed animation onto mocap data, YES there will be a lot of keys.
@@scotthuster3531 Yes, it always depends! This topic is so interesting. I got told this, when learning animation and I have to say, for a beginner, it's the perfect constraint to learn curves and interpolation. For example, we had to do a walk-cycle with 3 keyframes and honestly, it's enough if your poses are good. And that was the thing, I took with me. First, get all of your poses, and then add in-betweens where necessary. It just saves you a whole lot of work. When animating for video-games, they always get baked to 1's.
BS of course. Good artists steal the best. It's all about camouflaging your source reference so it is super hard for someone to figure out where it came from. Everything is reference.
@@lgtwzrd that’s even more BS. It’s not about hiding your reference in the slightest. It’s about being able to remix many sources of inspiration, honour them and improve on them instead of just blatantly copying a piece of reference. There’s a difference, since doing what I said inherently makes your reference harder to pin down, but hard to pin down reference doesn’t mean being artistically genuine in that way.
idk where youve heard this, becasue "use reference" and "copy other artists" is what everyone has told me. its important for getting the big stuff and building your own style and technique
3 advise i got the most is : "don't listen to music while animating" Since in morden time, absolute silence enviroment is almost impossible, thats why i need music to get into the flow "you have to responsible for all the demo reel assest" this advise is like tell the psychiatrist to mind reading ( btw no one can't do that ) "video reference is cheating" Da vinci draw an egg, the egg is the reference
I study graphic design at school and our teacher which is a 3D animator, motion designer, graphic designer etc who is like 30 years in the industry puts lowfi music in class for us to listen while we work. Edit : he told us he also listen to all kind of music while he works.
Weird. I have been teaching myself lip sync, and quite independently realized that everything I did always seemed about two frames too late, regardless of how technically correct it seemed. Moving it two-ish frames earlier made it work much better nearly every time. I didn't hear that anywhere, it just kind of happened... Huh.
I heard the first one from Cake Station here on YT and tried it myself. I have to say maybe it works if there is silence, but the unholy constant banshee's screaming of my PC fan convinced me to put on some classical/instrumental music
I just wanted to comment about the use of references. The video you posted yesterday or the day before about how to use references showed me a lot, so yesterday I decided to try to record myself doing the movement I wanted to animate and use that. Quite honestly, though the shot is very unimportant as a whole, it's easily the best shot I've ever animated. So thank you for the wonderful advice!
same! my college teachers are still overdoing on this constantly telling us that we need to learn everything and create everything even if it's not great. they just want generalists instead of specialists.
The two frame offset is a good rule of thumb, because when a person talks they make the shape with their mouth and then make the sound. I think of it like playing a trumpet you make the shape with your fingers and then blow out to play the note, and like you said it’s better to be too early then too late.
Some...less good advice I've gotten is to ONLY follow the Reference directly and never divert from it. That's more common when trying to create a more realistic digital human (this was in more of a vfx pipeline), but i still think even heavily 'realistic' animation can benefit from the 12 principles and more pushed, dare i say, cartoony sensibilities.
I just want to say THANK YOU for mentioning age. I was in your first Maya workshop and recently moved to London to attend school here in 3-D Digital Animation and VFX. One of my biggest worries has been getting into this career at my age. I know many students will be younger. I'm also uncertain how to look for work as a rigger. This is what I want to do; not the modeling or animation part. I want to be an amazing rigger.
Would love to see a part 2. Bad advice 3 is rampant across design and animation. Diversifying my style is the best thing I did as a motion graphics artist.
I got some of these advise from some of my teachers in college. Especially the one that " Dont post your work on social media" For a good while I had the mind set that I could only post on linked in and Vimeo to be a professional 3D animator. Ohh boy was i wrong. Im so glad I dont have that mind set anymore.
This is very helpful, the one with Richard Williams shocked me the most, but it’s so true as well. For me when I’m animating or drawing I have music I get distracted by going and back and forth to switch a song I don’t like. I can see where he was coming from. As for reference I agree, it needs to be used, and it’s been my biggest asset in my drawings and animation. BTW like the Dash shirt.
the "no music" tip is so true, I mean your saying about it. When I read it in the "Animator Survival Kit" I gone "WTF??" 100% agree with every word that you said about it.. Silence distracts me so much! I do have different music garages that work for different "focus types" . Even inside the field of animation. If I need to plan the main motion or gesture movement, or plan the frames position (I do frame by fame) then classic or instrumental for "problem solving mode" when everything is set and I just need to put the lines on the frames (in between's) then everything with high tempo goes. classic rock, metal, gangsta rap even psy trance :) Took me really long time to understand that.. to bad your video wasn't around 5 years ago :D Love your content Keep it up :)
i listen to lo-fi, easy listening/jazz when i’m writing or modeling, it works pretty great for me and helps reduce some stress from the process, personally i recommend any kind of study lo-fi you can find since those mixes do have the most ambient of music so they don’t take away from your attention.
That Richard Williams advice was allwaaayys so annoying to me haha. For my entire time in school I'd listen to podcats and youtube videos while I animated... my brain just can't focus unless my ears have something to absorb as well as my eyes lol. Even now I'm animating at a studio while listening to this video!! My animation skills have improved so much since 4 years ago when I started in the industry.. and podcasts & youtube videos definitely didn't interfere haha. I love these points & all of your advice videos! Keep em coming! :D
The brain is massively parallel, and chemical in nature. It can be harder to keep one section active (visual) while another is inactive (auditory and language) than engaging each. Which leads me to another piece of awful advice; fidgeting, pacing, leaning your chair, and doodling are all concentration *aids*. The point to moderate them is if they're distracting others (and it's quite possible a better choice is to reorient the person being distracted).
I felt the same. I couldn’t be left alone with my thoughts. But one day I just shit everything off and started animating in complete silence. It was difficult at first but I quickly saw vast improvement. That’s just my experience though.
For your question about 2D animation and animating at 12fps, yes, that's still absolutely a thing. We call it animating on 2's, since we add a new drawing every other frame. You can also animated on 3's or even 4's. This is actually an aesthetic choice, since with 2D animation, if you animate on every frame, the motion starts looking TOO smooth, kind of like British sitcoms. This is especially important on animation done via Flash/Harmony or any other cut-out style animation, since having all the motion in every frame makes the action look mechanical, what we call "tweeny", since the software generated the animation using linear pathing. That being said, we totally break that rule all the time and animate on 1's when necessary, since sometimes, especially for quick action, you might need that extra frame to avoid strobing or popping. Of course, a good smear will help with that as well. As for the lip sync, that probably comes from 2D flash and limited animation TV productions, as you say. We work tight deadlines, and lipsyncing is very regimented and mechanical. We only have certain shapes to work with, and sometimes we can't finesse the lipsync to the degree you do in feature 3D animation, so we have to use some shortcuts and cheats to get it looking ok.
As a person with adhd, I find i become super focused if I have some kind of background noise. I’m really glad you brought up that milt thing because I was worried when I read it in the book
I remember going to the Ottawa film festeval a few years ago and a few showrunners from nickelodeon and cartoon network were doing an open subject Q and A. Someone asked a question about porfolios and whether or not it's acceptable to have reinterpretations of existing designs [fanart] in your work. Of course this being a private portfolio and not a public facing one. One guy came out swinging about how it showed off a lack of creativity and demonstrating a naive reading of the industry; that is "oh you're just gonna be drawing cartoon characters all the time and never thinking critically about your own work" But then someone else on the stage said they liked seeing it [depending on the intent of course] because it showed the artist's ability to understand the context behind design choices which would inevitably lead to less mistakes/ need for re-takes and re-draws while boarding. It also shows that they might be able to work under other aesthetics and design languages easier and can handle being moved from project to project within a studio. Then they kinda duked it out for about three minutes but I think the lady on the side of the latter swayed the dude on the side of the former a little bit.
Sometimes in a busy environment people will interrupt you a lot during work. Sometimes putting a headphone, even if you're not listening to music can help with concentration. It really depends of your surroundings and all.
I walked into a comic book store for the first time in my life a couple years back. I looked through various comics looking for good artwork, looking to buy my first comic. literally 4/5 comics I picked up had photo backgrounds that were edited, and traced or edited 3d models for all the characters. As an artist, it felt like none of them had any artistic integrity or sense of craft. They looked like garbage compared to comics I had seen in passing as a kid. It turned me off of comics instantly. So yes, references are good and essential for study, but should not be used as a crutch or a replacement for study.
Couldn’t agree more. I hate modern comic art, absolutely terrible compared to what it once was. How can you tell 3D models are being used for characters?
@@reginaldforthright805 Depends if they use it as shortcut or a crutch. You can usually tell something is a model because the pose is stiff and the perspective, shadows, or lines are too uniform. Art in general has a lot of artistic liberty and exaggeration, and it's very obvious when it's absent. A good artist can use a model as a starting point, and add those elements, but a bad artist won't. There is also bad normal mapping/shadows, even on 3d models, which can make it obvious. The worst ones, though, are were they just take a 3d model and use a filter on it. They usually do that with weapons, vehicles, and rooms (and the worst artists do it with characters too).
The main way I interpreted the "don't listen to music while animating" advice is "don't listen to music while adjusting your timing." Listening to anything with rhythm while trying to nail the timing of an animation sounds... very difficult. Music can help set the mood when blocking the shot, though.
I actually have something on the 2-frame offset for vocal speaking. At the last job I had, my colleagues told me not to use Quicktime for my playblasts, because it had an offset in the audio and the video - like, baked in. No idea why, but apparently it was well-known at that studio to be the case. They used Shotgun's video player instead, RV, and it honestly DID look differently when you played a video in either editor. The 2-frame offset worked in Quicktime, but it felt off in RV - and vice versa. So it might be the case that a workaround for a commonly-used software simply wormed its way into peoples' best practices.
Being a 3D artist, I can't agree more with you on point no. 1! I almost never work without any kind of music on and when I read that part in the book, I was really puzzled, even tried for a few days when I was in college but didn't work out. Can't even create a basic cube polygon without music in my ears! (Well that last bit might have been an overstatement, but you get the idea.)
as 3d character artist i heard some of those bad advices too in my speciality, do realist not only stylized, use references is copy and you are a bad artist, do not learn or rig or animate, if you will never use them (sorry, but I love know how make life easier to my fellow coworkers! if i know what problems they will have i can solve those problem before they happens!) etc- etc
The explanation I heard 20 years ago concerning the 2-frame offset was this: Light travels faster than sound, and when you are sitting in a huge movie theater, the picture reaches your eyes slightly faster than the sound hits your ears. Therefore the sound should start 2 frames ahead of the picture. While this is accurate, this advice completely neglected the fact that the people who mix the souna at the end of production are completely aware of this and will - if needed - shift the complete sound as a whole by two frames. So, if you animate two frames ahead this might eventually end up in a four frame offset.
Great stuff, man! I definitely remember being told to shift lip sync 2 frames forward from one of my mentors at AM. Then the next semester being told not to do that.
The worst advice I got was that my style of art wasn't good enough for modern day animation so I might as well quit while i'm ahead. Come to find out 8 years later that it is becoming the standard. Edit** This was from a Judge type guy at an animation fair I took part in, in 7th grade.
Holy cow this is helpful. Just started reading Animators Survival Kit and struggled with the music part. And have also been questioning how heavily I rely on video reference. Really really appreciate the encouragement, Sir Wade!
Number one: I agree with that. Or at least - there's two phases to when I animate - first is to figure out the "outline" of the whole motion, second is the fiddling to make the poses right. And in that first phase, figuring out the "outline" of the whole motion, that's the moment where I define the rythm of if. And I literally use imagining sounds in my head as helpers to find the right tempo/rythm, where and how large the ease-in and ease-out phases need to be, etc. And in that phase, obviously, listening to music is disrupting the whole process... Once I have the keyframes properly timed and tempo-ed, however, and the rest is fiddling with the details of the pose, I can listen to music. But yeah, in general, being able to imagine sounds that would go with the animation, and with any (and all) motion in it, is helpful, and I agree that it most likely improves the animation almost automatically. Or, yeah, pausing the music whenever I need is a thing, whereas it wasn't, really, for the guy, in those times. But it still disrupts the flow, at least a bit. So I bet that if i were to work as an animator back then, I would follow that piece of advice religiously.
Just to add to the preparing of the mouth shapes part - I feel it's especially important before starting to talk, showing the mouth gearing up to speak. Worst advice I ever received was to block everything out pose to pose with held frames. I struggled to tell how much time was passing with still images so my timing was always off so I started doing pose to pose with interpolation and then mixing pose to pose with straight ahead animation and that worked for me. When I read the Animator's Survival Kit I was happy to see Richard Williams had a similar take on that.
Whenever I work on an important project I make a playlist of music that makes me "feel" how the scene is supposed to make the audience feel. This helps me set the tone a lot better, although I do scenery/environment modelling so slightly different workflow.
that about the silence, I had a boss that loved the silence and the tv show ended animated pretty boring, I think it depends on the project, but I love when I am working for fast pace projects to listen instrumental music or ambience sounds
That music advice was troubling me for years! While it is true that I'm more efficient in silence, especially in the morning, there's always a point where I don't really need to concentrate as much and it's more of a grind, so I start listening to stuff while feeling guilty about it. lol
I pretty much agree with you on all these. Techno is usually my music of choice while animating. Most of the time, what I'm listening to doesn't affect my animating in a bad way. 1 peace of advice that I constantly hear is to animate at 60 fps, or that higher frames rates are better. I talk about this in 1 of my videos.
I do listen to music while animating, it is true that sometimes I stop it, specially when checking if timing works but without music most of the times I would get frustrated and probably would not be able to finish the shot
When I need to get something done quickly, I start the On Her Majesty's Secret Service soundtrack (and replay it) until the work is done. And it gets done.
A widespread screen acting style is to deliver facial emotion/reaction just a small fraction of a second before the spoken word, it allegedly reads better and edits better.
Music: I have adhd and sld. I have serious issues with attention. I was miserable for the most part even after getting a job in animation coz i couldnt concentrate for a long period of time. Until i found binaural beats music. Basically they are specific tones you listen to and your brain is made to go into sertain states. Like concentration, relaxation or sleep. Depending on the frequency. This was like finding a magic potion or spell. I cud finally concentrate and animate for like an hr streight without breaking my concentrate. Its amazing. I also listen to motivate myself . Songs like Scared of the Dark from Spiderverse movie. Coz its really motivational and since its from one of the best 3d animated movies ever its double the effect. Really helps me pick myself up if am having a bad day during work. But there are also times when i just dont listen to anything while working. So i guess it all depends on the person/time/place/mood ect. Reference: for acting shot i almost always make reference myself. For cartoon acting i shoot reference while exaggerating my actions and then i edit the timing of the reference for comedic/exaggerated looks. For action shots i get reference from the internet. Lipsync: almost 99% of the time while lypsyncing you have to anticipate into the mouthshape. So that the viewer already knows the shape of the mouth before the sound is heard. This is only broken while doing extream cartoony lynpsyncs or where the scene specifically require you to do stuttery kind of mouth movements which is super rare.
Extra thought about lipsync: I think it depends more on the sound, there are some sounds we need to pose our mouth before letting the air scapes, and then the sound will happen, for this case, it is nice to anticipate the shape of the mouth (not by 2 frames, rather by the amount of time necessary), other shapes will need more time to the eye register, so I don't think there is a "rule" for this, more like be aware that sounds travel and what it matters the most is how the audience perceive your work.
Personally I can't focus in complete silence. I get bored and just lose focus. Doing multiple things at once keeps me focused. Having the ability to have multiple apps open at the same time helps a lot there
I love listening to music when working with anything visual. Any random noise in the midst of quiet is far more distracting than rhythms and sounds that you know are coming up. It’s far easier to tune out for me.
Totally agree to the point not to stuck on one genre of animation. Internet is filled with such advices, to stuck with one genre and expertise in that....I had this conflicting thought always, after many years of experience in animation one always like to hop from one genre to another, just to get the chance on variety of different style.
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The speed of light is much greater than the speed of sound, that's why the visual event has to be shown before it's heard.
Sir Wade your videos are awesome! It is funny because I took Electrical Engineering and now I am about to start my journey at 3D animation, just like you did (except that you also took computer programming before animation)
Great stuff! One more angle on the keyframes preceding audio thing is that sounds can happen between 2 frames and its less noticable if the movement is a 1/2 frame too early. I also heard music can impact timing. For instance, listening fast or aggressive music can have a negative impact on animating a romantic scene.
Thank you very much on your time and energy, I will soon start to make stuff in Maya and beside books now you are mine only mentor. :) Thank you very very much!
I tend to be somewhat sensitive to distractions, so there are certain kinds of music that will throw off my thoughts. Those tend to be tracks with lyrics, because my brain assigns a high priority to interpreting spoken word. My brain also sometimes likes to pay more attention than I'd necessarily prefer, to tracks I'm unfamiliar with. So I find it useful to curate my own playlist of music, which has no lyrics (mono and sub-syllabic vocal chops at most), is entirely composed of songs I already listened to more than three times, and which has *no* advertisements. (Advertisements are designed specifically to be attention grabbing. Which is another way of saying "distracting".)
I've taken the comment from the Animator's toolkit to heart and it has working in my favour many times but I do agree that it depends on who you are, I think it also depends on what you're listening too, If I'm about to animate something slow and calm, I shouldn't have the DOOM Eternal soundtrack blasting through my headphones, finding a playlist that fits the mood of the scene can actually help to concentrate too, that's what I've found.
Hi sir, I got an advice from a senior that we shouldn't take famous movie or series scenes as reference for the demo reel animation. But I can't get why. Thanks a lot for the video❤️
I’m an animation student and we started our first 2D lip sync assignment this week! Most 2D animation is done on ‘2s’ at 24fps, so as you said one drawing held for 2 frames, so 12 drawings in one second. We’re also taught to offset the dialogue animation from the audio by at least 2 frames. It’s something to do with how the brain processes audio faster than visuals, so having them synced makes the animation look delayed. I played around with it myself to see if it was true and I found that it mostly was, lol. Some of my sounds are offset by as much as 4 frames but that’s more of a ‘set up’ for big accent sounds at the beginning of a phrase. We haven’t done 3D lip sync just yet so I’m excited to see how that carries over!
I am someone who likes to listen to music constantly while I work on stuff and the only time it gets in my way is if I need to do lip sync though it's not that I don't mind working in silence it's just having nothing in the background while trying to concentrate can get annoying at times.
One of my professors told me to NEVER use rY on clavicles....that's ridiculous and hurt my animation and frustrated me for a long time until I finally got a second opinion on that advice
Great advice bro. Because of you, I found out about Maya Indie. I signed up last week. I'll try them for the year, and if they're no longer offering the program for the same price, I'll start learning Blender. It's going to make me cry, but I can't be in this unstable relationship with Maya. We'll see. Thanks again bro.
I noticed a funny habit I have, I always listen to music when working but if something goes wrong and I need to think about it I pause the music without even considering it, and resume it when I know what I want to do. But while I listen to music, I cannot focus on work and a podcast/video at the same time. I'll either be listening to the podcast/video or working and completely miss what is being said.
I loved video with Simon Otto he has amazing flight tips and how air works and all so thank you showing all good tips and all bad tips. If not to much ask I’d still like you to make video with more information about dragon flight but if to much or you want to make different videos that ok
I need to listen to the rythm of my animation. Audiobooks work as long as I don't need to figure out things. But music just doesn't go well with me trying to feel the timings.
I love the way you talk so fast , I don't waste a second while watching you. In 20 min i didn't even see the time how much more left . Thanks for the advice you share :)
That advice only works if the environment is quiet, e.g., you live in your own remote house in a country side. I have no choice but to listen to music, because if I turn the music off, all I shall hear is noises from the neighbours. I really do not wish to listen to music and focus in a quiet environment, but I am not rich enough to afford to live in a quiet place.
wrt music while animating: the only argument against music i've heard that actually makes sense is that it can mess with your timing. It's certainly something you should keep in mind while working. And also wrt "create your own assets" it kinda depends on where you apply to. Especially in the indie scene being able to rig is a huge factor. Not every studio has their own dedicated TA so sometimes it ends up with you doing it. Also knowing the basics of the different departments is huge when it comes to effective communication and potential problem spotting (Kiel figgings had a bunch of tweets some time ago about armor design and flexibility for example. that's something you can already spot in the concept art but if it goes unnoticed it can really mess with your animation)
Advice 1: When I draw I put on Winter Soldier's movie soundtrack on loop. It's harder to get distracted by music when there are no words and you don't have to skip songs. And I find the tempos of all the songs to be varying and interesting enough to not get boring or repetitive while also sounding similar enough to not change the overall setting or mood. And the specific song "Captain America" gets looped the most as it is so motivating and makes you feel like doing something. My Spotify showed it was my most listened to song all last year. Advice 4: I was told by a classmate in 6th grade who wasn't an artist that I wasn't a real artist for using reference and for drawing the underlying structures. If I was a real artist I would be able to draw things without all the extra lines. I let that stop me from learning the fundamentals for years and trying to draw what takes professionals years to get to without drawing the basics first.
For #5 (animate two frames ahead of dialogue), when I was learning animation, I was taught that this was to compensate for a rendering issue with Adobe Flash at the time (vers. CS3-CS6). The problem was that, when scrubbing the timeline either manually, or playing the animation without rendering it in the SWF player, Flash would have trouble processing both the vector animation calculations and the sound rendering, and so, if you were testing sound, and animating right on the the wave form, you would actually be two frames behind, or behind enough for the animation and sound to not be interpreted as synchronized. Thus, the safe bet (in addition to establishing a comments layer as your X-sheet) was to animate two frames ahead, just to be safe. I'm surprised that's still a piece of advice, especially given the the decline of Flash/Animate's reputation AND the advances the software has made since then. Also, if anyone else has any corrections, I'd love to read them, because this was hearsay when I learned it, and it might actually be something else entirely.
My teachers explained that you generally shouldn't listen to music when animating because you can be lulled into animating to the beat of the song you are listening to.
What awful advice have YOU been given? At school? At work? Remember to like the video if we should do a part 2! :)
That i need to buy a tablet
Nice
It was maybe private or unlisted
Great video! Worst advice I was given when I was starting out: don't use a lot of keys. The advice had good intent, the animator was explaining how he'd inherited a scene from another animator and the curves were a mess. But, the way I took it was use the most minimal amount of keys possible and my animation suffered because of it. I didn't have as many breakdowns, micro adjustments like slight weight shifts in the feet, because I thought I was using "too many keys". Lesson I eventually figured out: it's okay to use a lot of keys as long as you know the intent behind it. Also there's no set rule for too much or too little keys. I've heard of some animators who actually animate on 1's. If it's a fast action in a short amount of time, YES there will be a lot of keys. If you're baking keyed animation onto mocap data, YES there will be a lot of keys.
@@scotthuster3531 Yes, it always depends! This topic is so interesting. I got told this, when learning animation and I have to say, for a beginner, it's the perfect constraint to learn curves and interpolation. For example, we had to do a walk-cycle with 3 keyframes and honestly, it's enough if your poses are good.
And that was the thing, I took with me. First, get all of your poses, and then add in-betweens where necessary. It just saves you a whole lot of work.
When animating for video-games, they always get baked to 1's.
the drawing community also has the "never draw from reference, that's cheating" thing :/
BS of course. Good artists steal the best. It's all about camouflaging your source reference so it is super hard for someone to figure out where it came from. Everything is reference.
@@lgtwzrd that’s even more BS. It’s not about hiding your reference in the slightest. It’s about being able to remix many sources of inspiration, honour them and improve on them instead of just blatantly copying a piece of reference. There’s a difference, since doing what I said inherently makes your reference harder to pin down, but hard to pin down reference doesn’t mean being artistically genuine in that way.
Don't forget about the "don't use grid, it's cheating!" stuff
idk where youve heard this, becasue "use reference" and "copy other artists" is what everyone has told me. its important for getting the big stuff and building your own style and technique
Sir's videos are such a good resource.
Let's get him to 100k subs soon. He's so close!
Hi Ami!!!
He's past that threshold now, and deservedly so. Also, I am like #69... ... Nice.
4:15 made me pause my work, alt-tab to my browser to check why the video had stopped, which drove home your point perfectly. Well played.
Hahaha that's incredible!! Full credit goes to Alice for adding that in the edit :)
3 advise i got the most is :
"don't listen to music while animating"
Since in morden time, absolute silence enviroment is almost impossible, thats why i need music to get into the flow
"you have to responsible for all the demo reel assest"
this advise is like tell the psychiatrist to mind reading ( btw no one can't do that )
"video reference is cheating"
Da vinci draw an egg, the egg is the reference
I just listen to lowfi music while working they ain't so distracting
Same!
I mean its different for everyone, I do that too!
I study graphic design at school and our teacher which is a 3D animator, motion designer, graphic designer etc who is like 30 years in the industry puts lowfi music in class for us to listen while we work.
Edit : he told us he also listen to all kind of music while he works.
Yo same
@@PotatoGodzilla That's cool 🌟
i was just watching your video uploaded 2 years ago...and man you're grown! more confident, more energetic, better presentation
Thank you! :) I really appreciate that! It's definitely a journey, haha.
Weird. I have been teaching myself lip sync, and quite independently realized that everything I did always seemed about two frames too late, regardless of how technically correct it seemed. Moving it two-ish frames earlier made it work much better nearly every time. I didn't hear that anywhere, it just kind of happened...
Huh.
I heard the first one from Cake Station here on YT and tried it myself. I have to say maybe it works if there is silence, but the unholy constant banshee's screaming of my PC fan convinced me to put on some classical/instrumental music
"Unholy banshee screaming" lmao
OOOOOOOWIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII XD
Have you heard of our saviour Noctua.
Lofi is cool too, I love zelda lofi the first video
I just wanted to comment about the use of references. The video you posted yesterday or the day before about how to use references showed me a lot, so yesterday I decided to try to record myself doing the movement I wanted to animate and use that. Quite honestly, though the shot is very unimportant as a whole, it's easily the best shot I've ever animated. So thank you for the wonderful advice!
I hear advise #3 all the freaking time on portfolio for 3D game art. If I listened to that advise back in the day I would not have my current job.
same! my college teachers are still overdoing on this constantly telling us that we need to learn everything and create everything even if it's not great. they just want generalists instead of specialists.
The two frame offset is a good rule of thumb, because when a person talks they make the shape with their mouth and then make the sound. I think of it like playing a trumpet you make the shape with your fingers and then blow out to play the note, and like you said it’s better to be too early then too late.
Some...less good advice I've gotten is to ONLY follow the Reference directly and never divert from it. That's more common when trying to create a more realistic digital human (this was in more of a vfx pipeline), but i still think even heavily 'realistic' animation can benefit from the 12 principles and more pushed, dare i say, cartoony sensibilities.
Finally! Someone else feels this way!
I just want to say THANK YOU for mentioning age. I was in your first Maya workshop and recently moved to London to attend school here in 3-D Digital Animation and VFX. One of my biggest worries has been getting into this career at my age. I know many students will be younger. I'm also uncertain how to look for work as a rigger. This is what I want to do; not the modeling or animation part. I want to be an amazing rigger.
Hi Randolph, you wrote this comment two years ago. I'm very curious, did you manage to find a job in the industry?
@@Animationcafe No, the course I was enrolled in was cancelled because of COVID.
You can't pull from your mental library if it's empty you gotta fill it up with all sorts of reference
Reference is key, reference is love, reference is life
Would love to see a part 2. Bad advice 3 is rampant across design and animation.
Diversifying my style is the best thing I did as a motion graphics artist.
I got some of these advise from some of my teachers in college. Especially the one that " Dont post your work on social media" For a good while I had the mind set that I could only post on linked in and Vimeo to be a professional 3D animator. Ohh boy was i wrong. Im so glad I dont have that mind set anymore.
This is very helpful, the one with Richard Williams shocked me the most, but it’s so true as well. For me when I’m animating or drawing I have music I get distracted by going and back and forth to switch a song I don’t like. I can see where he was coming from. As for reference I agree, it needs to be used, and it’s been my biggest asset in my drawings and animation. BTW like the Dash shirt.
the "no music" tip is so true, I mean your saying about it. When I read it in the "Animator Survival Kit" I gone "WTF??"
100% agree with every word that you said about it.. Silence distracts me so much! I do
have different music garages that work for different "focus types" .
Even inside the field of animation. If I need to plan the main motion or gesture movement, or plan the frames position (I do frame by fame)
then classic or instrumental for "problem solving mode" when everything is set and I just need to put the lines on the frames (in between's) then everything with high tempo goes. classic rock, metal, gangsta rap even psy trance :)
Took me really long time to understand that.. to bad your video wasn't around 5 years ago :D
Love your content
Keep it up :)
i listen to lo-fi, easy listening/jazz when i’m writing or modeling, it works pretty great for me and helps reduce some stress from the process, personally i recommend any kind of study lo-fi you can find since those mixes do have the most ambient of music so they don’t take away from your attention.
That Richard Williams advice was allwaaayys so annoying to me haha. For my entire time in school I'd listen to podcats and youtube videos while I animated... my brain just can't focus unless my ears have something to absorb as well as my eyes lol. Even now I'm animating at a studio while listening to this video!! My animation skills have improved so much since 4 years ago when I started in the industry.. and podcasts & youtube videos definitely didn't interfere haha. I love these points & all of your advice videos! Keep em coming! :D
The brain is massively parallel, and chemical in nature. It can be harder to keep one section active (visual) while another is inactive (auditory and language) than engaging each. Which leads me to another piece of awful advice; fidgeting, pacing, leaning your chair, and doodling are all concentration *aids*. The point to moderate them is if they're distracting others (and it's quite possible a better choice is to reorient the person being distracted).
I felt the same. I couldn’t be left alone with my thoughts. But one day I just shit everything off and started animating in complete silence. It was difficult at first but I quickly saw vast improvement. That’s just my experience though.
For your question about 2D animation and animating at 12fps, yes, that's still absolutely a thing. We call it animating on 2's, since we add a new drawing every other frame. You can also animated on 3's or even 4's. This is actually an aesthetic choice, since with 2D animation, if you animate on every frame, the motion starts looking TOO smooth, kind of like British sitcoms. This is especially important on animation done via Flash/Harmony or any other cut-out style animation, since having all the motion in every frame makes the action look mechanical, what we call "tweeny", since the software generated the animation using linear pathing.
That being said, we totally break that rule all the time and animate on 1's when necessary, since sometimes, especially for quick action, you might need that extra frame to avoid strobing or popping. Of course, a good smear will help with that as well.
As for the lip sync, that probably comes from 2D flash and limited animation TV productions, as you say. We work tight deadlines, and lipsyncing is very regimented and mechanical. We only have certain shapes to work with, and sometimes we can't finesse the lipsync to the degree you do in feature 3D animation, so we have to use some shortcuts and cheats to get it looking ok.
As a person with adhd, I find i become super focused if I have some kind of background noise. I’m really glad you brought up that milt thing because I was worried when I read it in the book
I remember going to the Ottawa film festeval a few years ago and a few showrunners from nickelodeon and cartoon network were doing an open subject Q and A. Someone asked a question about porfolios and whether or not it's acceptable to have reinterpretations of existing designs [fanart] in your work. Of course this being a private portfolio and not a public facing one. One guy came out swinging about how it showed off a lack of creativity and demonstrating a naive reading of the industry; that is "oh you're just gonna be drawing cartoon characters all the time and never thinking critically about your own work"
But then someone else on the stage said they liked seeing it [depending on the intent of course] because it showed the artist's ability to understand the context behind design choices which would inevitably lead to less mistakes/ need for re-takes and re-draws while boarding. It also shows that they might be able to work under other aesthetics and design languages easier and can handle being moved from project to project within a studio.
Then they kinda duked it out for about three minutes but I think the lady on the side of the latter swayed the dude on the side of the former a little bit.
Sometimes in a busy environment people will interrupt you a lot during work. Sometimes putting a headphone, even if you're not listening to music can help with concentration.
It really depends of your surroundings and all.
I walked into a comic book store for the first time in my life a couple years back. I looked through various comics looking for good artwork, looking to buy my first comic.
literally 4/5 comics I picked up had photo backgrounds that were edited, and traced or edited 3d models for all the characters. As an artist, it felt like none of them had any artistic integrity or sense of craft. They looked like garbage compared to comics I had seen in passing as a kid. It turned me off of comics instantly. So yes, references are good and essential for study, but should not be used as a crutch or a replacement for study.
Couldn’t agree more. I hate modern comic art, absolutely terrible compared to what it once was. How can you tell 3D models are being used for characters?
@@reginaldforthright805 Depends if they use it as shortcut or a crutch. You can usually tell something is a model because the pose is stiff and the perspective, shadows, or lines are too uniform. Art in general has a lot of artistic liberty and exaggeration, and it's very obvious when it's absent. A good artist can use a model as a starting point, and add those elements, but a bad artist won't. There is also bad normal mapping/shadows, even on 3d models, which can make it obvious.
The worst ones, though, are were they just take a 3d model and use a filter on it. They usually do that with weapons, vehicles, and rooms (and the worst artists do it with characters too).
The main way I interpreted the "don't listen to music while animating" advice is "don't listen to music while adjusting your timing." Listening to anything with rhythm while trying to nail the timing of an animation sounds... very difficult. Music can help set the mood when blocking the shot, though.
I actually have something on the 2-frame offset for vocal speaking.
At the last job I had, my colleagues told me not to use Quicktime for my playblasts, because it had an offset in the audio and the video - like, baked in. No idea why, but apparently it was well-known at that studio to be the case. They used Shotgun's video player instead, RV, and it honestly DID look differently when you played a video in either editor. The 2-frame offset worked in Quicktime, but it felt off in RV - and vice versa.
So it might be the case that a workaround for a commonly-used software simply wormed its way into peoples' best practices.
Such content and professionalism in your content bro, never stop this
Being a 3D artist, I can't agree more with you on point no. 1! I almost never work without any kind of music on and when I read that part in the book, I was really puzzled, even tried for a few days when I was in college but didn't work out. Can't even create a basic cube polygon without music in my ears! (Well that last bit might have been an overstatement, but you get the idea.)
I think the animating without a reference thing probably came from people saying "Try animating using as little reference as possible as an exercise"
The animation preceding the audio is from Richard William's book! In it he suggests that it's not always necessary. Excellent vid, thank you!
as 3d character artist i heard some of those bad advices too in my speciality, do realist not only stylized, use references is copy and you are a bad artist, do not learn or rig or animate, if you will never use them (sorry, but I love know how make life easier to my fellow coworkers! if i know what problems they will have i can solve those problem before they happens!)
etc- etc
I love your channel dude!!
good advice is always good but not good as bad sometimes
the 2 frames before sound, definitely a big mistake I stick to before, once I follow the sound to do lipsync, it becomes much making sense
I'm glad you made the Blender video since I am a Blender user myself and I would not have found this channel otherwise. These are great advice!
The explanation I heard 20 years ago concerning the 2-frame offset was this: Light travels faster than sound, and when you are sitting in a huge movie theater, the picture reaches your eyes slightly faster than the sound hits your ears. Therefore the sound should start 2 frames ahead of the picture. While this is accurate, this advice completely neglected the fact that the people who mix the souna at the end of production are completely aware of this and will - if needed - shift the complete sound as a whole by two frames. So, if you animate two frames ahead this might eventually end up in a four frame offset.
"An artist without their tools is just a skilled laborer" WORST THING I EVA HEARD
What is it even supposed to MEAN?
About the first part: I animate while watching (well basically listening) your video's. Basically like a sort of podcast
Great stuff, man! I definitely remember being told to shift lip sync 2 frames forward from one of my mentors at AM. Then the next semester being told not to do that.
The worst advice I got was that my style of art wasn't good enough for modern day animation so I might as well quit while i'm ahead. Come to find out 8 years later that it is becoming the standard.
Edit** This was from a Judge type guy at an animation fair I took part in, in 7th grade.
lmao 7th grade??? dont listen o anyone when youre that young, its way more important to just head down and put the time in, no matter what
I am planning to open my own work office, your all videos too helpful, Sir, thanks a lot.
i just noticed tony starks infinity gauntlet in the back
Fancy seeing you here
good eye sir
That’s actually a bedtime power toy...
oh hey guys lol
@@abstractreality4132 took you 2 months to finally find us in the comments nub
Holy cow this is helpful. Just started reading Animators Survival Kit and struggled with the music part. And have also been questioning how heavily I rely on video reference. Really really appreciate the encouragement, Sir Wade!
Number one: I agree with that. Or at least - there's two phases to when I animate - first is to figure out the "outline" of the whole motion, second is the fiddling to make the poses right. And in that first phase, figuring out the "outline" of the whole motion, that's the moment where I define the rythm of if. And I literally use imagining sounds in my head as helpers to find the right tempo/rythm, where and how large the ease-in and ease-out phases need to be, etc. And in that phase, obviously, listening to music is disrupting the whole process... Once I have the keyframes properly timed and tempo-ed, however, and the rest is fiddling with the details of the pose, I can listen to music. But yeah, in general, being able to imagine sounds that would go with the animation, and with any (and all) motion in it, is helpful, and I agree that it most likely improves the animation almost automatically.
Or, yeah, pausing the music whenever I need is a thing, whereas it wasn't, really, for the guy, in those times. But it still disrupts the flow, at least a bit. So I bet that if i were to work as an animator back then, I would follow that piece of advice religiously.
Just to add to the preparing of the mouth shapes part - I feel it's especially important before starting to talk, showing the mouth gearing up to speak. Worst advice I ever received was to block everything out pose to pose with held frames. I struggled to tell how much time was passing with still images so my timing was always off so I started doing pose to pose with interpolation and then mixing pose to pose with straight ahead animation and that worked for me. When I read the Animator's Survival Kit I was happy to see Richard Williams had a similar take on that.
Whenever I work on an important project I make a playlist of music that makes me "feel" how the scene is supposed to make the audience feel. This helps me set the tone a lot better, although I do scenery/environment modelling so slightly different workflow.
that about the silence, I had a boss that loved the silence and the tv show ended animated pretty boring, I think it depends on the project, but I love when I am working for fast pace projects to listen instrumental music or ambience sounds
Lets get Sir Wade to 100K subs! So close dude! Also I too would recommend the animator’s survival kit, it has saved my life many times!
That music advice was troubling me for years! While it is true that I'm more efficient in silence, especially in the morning, there's always a point where I don't really need to concentrate as much and it's more of a grind, so I start listening to stuff while feeling guilty about it. lol
YES! I'm always STILL watching...
I pretty much agree with you on all these. Techno is usually my music of choice while animating. Most of the time, what I'm listening to doesn't affect my animating in a bad way. 1 peace of advice that I constantly hear is to animate at 60 fps, or that higher frames rates are better. I talk about this in 1 of my videos.
I do listen to music while animating, it is true that sometimes I stop it, specially when checking if timing works but without music most of the times I would get frustrated and probably would not be able to finish the shot
When I need to get something done quickly, I start the On Her Majesty's Secret Service soundtrack (and replay it) until the work is done. And it gets done.
When you told on Twitch that your mailing this video . I was excited from that moment now finally I watched it and I 100% agree with you
A widespread screen acting style is to deliver facial emotion/reaction just a small fraction of a second before the spoken word, it allegedly reads better and edits better.
Sometimes I match the music to the subject matter and it really helps me keep the momentum going
Music: I have adhd and sld. I have serious issues with attention. I was miserable for the most part even after getting a job in animation coz i couldnt concentrate for a long period of time. Until i found binaural beats music. Basically they are specific tones you listen to and your brain is made to go into sertain states. Like concentration, relaxation or sleep. Depending on the frequency. This was like finding a magic potion or spell. I cud finally concentrate and animate for like an hr streight without breaking my concentrate. Its amazing.
I also listen to motivate myself . Songs like Scared of the Dark from Spiderverse movie. Coz its really motivational and since its from one of the best 3d animated movies ever its double the effect. Really helps me pick myself up if am having a bad day during work. But there are also times when i just dont listen to anything while working. So i guess it all depends on the person/time/place/mood ect.
Reference: for acting shot i almost always make reference myself. For cartoon acting i shoot reference while exaggerating my actions and then i edit the timing of the reference for comedic/exaggerated looks. For action shots i get reference from the internet.
Lipsync: almost 99% of the time while lypsyncing you have to anticipate into the mouthshape. So that the viewer already knows the shape of the mouth before the sound is heard. This is only broken while doing extream cartoony lynpsyncs or where the scene specifically require you to do stuttery kind of mouth movements which is super rare.
Extra thought about lipsync: I think it depends more on the sound, there are some sounds we need to pose our mouth before letting the air scapes, and then the sound will happen, for this case, it is nice to anticipate the shape of the mouth (not by 2 frames, rather by the amount of time necessary), other shapes will need more time to the eye register, so I don't think there is a "rule" for this, more like be aware that sounds travel and what it matters the most is how the audience perceive your work.
Amazing master, Sir Wade! 100K now!
Personally I can't focus in complete silence. I get bored and just lose focus. Doing multiple things at once keeps me focused. Having the ability to have multiple apps open at the same time helps a lot there
I love listening to music when working with anything visual. Any random noise in the midst of quiet is far more distracting than rhythms and sounds that you know are coming up. It’s far easier to tune out for me.
Totally agree to the point not to stuck on one genre of animation. Internet is filled with such advices, to stuck with one genre and expertise in that....I had this conflicting thought always, after many years of experience in animation one always like to hop from one genre to another, just to get the chance on variety of different style.
The speed of light is much greater than the speed of sound, that's why the visual event has to be shown before it's heard.
Can be* not has to be
Sir Wade your videos are awesome! It is funny because I took Electrical Engineering and now I am about to start my journey at 3D animation, just like you did (except that you also took computer programming before animation)
Great stuff! One more angle on the keyframes preceding audio thing is that sounds can happen between 2 frames and its less noticable if the movement is a 1/2 frame too early. I also heard music can impact timing. For instance, listening fast or aggressive music can have a negative impact on animating a romantic scene.
the offset sound advice comes from the Animator's Survival Kit
Thank you very much on your time and energy, I will soon start to make stuff in Maya and beside books now you are mine only mentor. :) Thank you very very much!
I tend to be somewhat sensitive to distractions, so there are certain kinds of music that will throw off my thoughts. Those tend to be tracks with lyrics, because my brain assigns a high priority to interpreting spoken word. My brain also sometimes likes to pay more attention than I'd necessarily prefer, to tracks I'm unfamiliar with.
So I find it useful to curate my own playlist of music, which has no lyrics (mono and sub-syllabic vocal chops at most), is entirely composed of songs I already listened to more than three times, and which has *no* advertisements. (Advertisements are designed specifically to be attention grabbing. Which is another way of saying "distracting".)
I've taken the comment from the Animator's toolkit to heart and it has working in my favour many times but I do agree that it depends on who you are, I think it also depends on what you're listening too, If I'm about to animate something slow and calm, I shouldn't have the DOOM Eternal soundtrack blasting through my headphones, finding a playlist that fits the mood of the scene can actually help to concentrate too, that's what I've found.
same here , for the music advices
Hi sir, I got an advice from a senior that we shouldn't take famous movie or series scenes as reference for the demo reel animation. But I can't get why. Thanks a lot for the video❤️
I’m an animation student and we started our first 2D lip sync assignment this week! Most 2D animation is done on ‘2s’ at 24fps, so as you said one drawing held for 2 frames, so 12 drawings in one second. We’re also taught to offset the dialogue animation from the audio by at least 2 frames. It’s something to do with how the brain processes audio faster than visuals, so having them synced makes the animation look delayed. I played around with it myself to see if it was true and I found that it mostly was, lol. Some of my sounds are offset by as much as 4 frames but that’s more of a ‘set up’ for big accent sounds at the beginning of a phrase. We haven’t done 3D lip sync just yet so I’m excited to see how that carries over!
Yeah. I tried working unplugged.....I fell asleep.
I am someone who likes to listen to music constantly while I work on stuff and the only time it gets in my way is if I need to do lip sync though it's not that I don't mind working in silence it's just having nothing in the background while trying to concentrate can get annoying at times.
One of my professors told me to NEVER use rY on clavicles....that's ridiculous and hurt my animation and frustrated me for a long time until I finally got a second opinion on that advice
Great advice bro. Because of you, I found out about Maya Indie. I signed up last week. I'll try them for the year, and if they're no longer offering the program for the same price, I'll start learning Blender. It's going to make me cry, but I can't be in this unstable relationship with Maya. We'll see. Thanks again bro.
i was just listening when the sounds stoped and I came back to see what was happening hahah - good timing
That shirt is fire! I need it
I noticed a funny habit I have, I always listen to music when working but if something goes wrong and I need to think about it I pause the music without even considering it, and resume it when I know what I want to do. But while I listen to music, I cannot focus on work and a podcast/video at the same time. I'll either be listening to the podcast/video or working and completely miss what is being said.
I do 2D animation and we are always told to do the audio 2 frames before because you make the mouth shape before you make the sound
i hear music while working to isolate myself from the world. It helps to not get distracted.
I loved video with Simon Otto he has amazing flight tips and how air works and all so thank you showing all good tips and all bad tips. If not to much ask I’d still like you to make video with more information about dragon flight but if to much or you want to make different videos that ok
I need to listen to the rythm of my animation. Audiobooks work as long as I don't need to figure out things. But music just doesn't go well with me trying to feel the timings.
I love the way you talk so fast , I don't waste a second while watching you. In 20 min i didn't even see the time how much more left . Thanks for the advice you share :)
Thank Wade.
Sir Wade, thanks for the insights, your tips are very helpful.
I find Buckethead is great music to listen to while i'm working. No lyrics and amazing guitar :) Obviously not for everyone but anyway
on the last note, i got hired off of twitter and been loving my job.
That advice only works if the environment is quiet, e.g., you live in your own remote house in a country side. I have no choice but to listen to music, because if I turn the music off, all I shall hear is noises from the neighbours. I really do not wish to listen to music and focus in a quiet environment, but I am not rich enough to afford to live in a quiet place.
wrt music while animating: the only argument against music i've heard that actually makes sense is that it can mess with your timing. It's certainly something you should keep in mind while working.
And also wrt "create your own assets" it kinda depends on where you apply to. Especially in the indie scene being able to rig is a huge factor. Not every studio has their own dedicated TA so sometimes it ends up with you doing it. Also knowing the basics of the different departments is huge when it comes to effective communication and potential problem spotting (Kiel figgings had a bunch of tweets some time ago about armor design and flexibility for example. that's something you can already spot in the concept art but if it goes unnoticed it can really mess with your animation)
These are some great tips! I'm definitely gonna use them :)
Advice 1: When I draw I put on Winter Soldier's movie soundtrack on loop. It's harder to get distracted by music when there are no words and you don't have to skip songs. And I find the tempos of all the songs to be varying and interesting enough to not get boring or repetitive while also sounding similar enough to not change the overall setting or mood. And the specific song "Captain America" gets looped the most as it is so motivating and makes you feel like doing something. My Spotify showed it was my most listened to song all last year.
Advice 4: I was told by a classmate in 6th grade who wasn't an artist that I wasn't a real artist for using reference and for drawing the underlying structures. If I was a real artist I would be able to draw things without all the extra lines. I let that stop me from learning the fundamentals for years and trying to draw what takes professionals years to get to without drawing the basics first.
I cannot believe that have some advice like that haha... @Sir Wade I agree with your ideas!
For #5 (animate two frames ahead of dialogue), when I was learning animation, I was taught that this was to compensate for a rendering issue with Adobe Flash at the time (vers. CS3-CS6).
The problem was that, when scrubbing the timeline either manually, or playing the animation without rendering it in the SWF player, Flash would have trouble processing both the vector animation calculations and the sound rendering, and so, if you were testing sound, and animating right on the the wave form, you would actually be two frames behind, or behind enough for the animation and sound to not be interpreted as synchronized. Thus, the safe bet (in addition to establishing a comments layer as your X-sheet) was to animate two frames ahead, just to be safe.
I'm surprised that's still a piece of advice, especially given the the decline of Flash/Animate's reputation AND the advances the software has made since then. Also, if anyone else has any corrections, I'd love to read them, because this was hearsay when I learned it, and it might actually be something else entirely.
Light travells faster then sound. So the thing of 2 frams ahead is may be because of that
My teachers explained that you generally shouldn't listen to music when animating because you can be lulled into animating to the beat of the song you are listening to.
You now what? :D I'm listening to you right now while animating and it's okay :D