KVCC: AAMT 111 - 2D Animation
AAMT 173 - Storyboarding
Explore the foundations of how to translate a story idea to a visually animated scene.
AAMT 132 - Character Design
Discover how to populate your story with likable characters and a believable world.
AAMT 111 - 2D Animation
Explore the process of putting your ideas into an actual 2D-Animation workflow.
AAMT 131 - 3D Animation
Find out how to translate your ideas into a working 3D-Animation pipeline.
2D Animation Breakdown
WHAT
2D Animation is the process of taking a given story or scene and animating it within a flat, 2D environment. This process can be done via traditional pencil, pen, and paper, but modern approaches often involve a computer environment.
WHEN
The actual implementation of 2D Animation is one of the last (and largest) parts of the animation pipeline. The equivalent is implementation of 3D Animation. One often chooses 2D when they want a very specific look/style, or maybe don’t want to go through the very steep learning curve of 3D Animation.
HOW
Creating a 2D Animation often involves a lot of planning, and multiple stages of drawing and redrawing the same image for every frame.
The initial drawing will often be extremely rough and sketchy. Then each successive re-drawing gets gradually more detailed and more fluid, with additional in-between frames being added to make it feel “smooth”.
WHY
The ultimate goal of an animation pipeline is to have a final animation of some kind.
The two options are 2D Animation or 3D Animation, each having their own benefits and drawbacks.
2D Animation pipelines have been around form much longer than 3D, and are more tried-and-true. While technology is evolving on all fronts, so the 2D animation pipeline is evolving to some extent, it’s much more stable and changes much less often than 3D Animation.
The drawback is that 2D Animation tends to be more rigid, and is generally harder to make retroactive changes towards the end of production.
