What do you want to improve in your animation workflow?

Hello Newgrounds! It's been a while. I've been focusing on programming for a while now, and I've recently accepted an offer to start grad school at the University of British Columbia in the fall. While I haven't been actively making animations any more, I've kind of come full circle, and my work in computer science is now directly related to animation again. Specifically, I'm interested in how better software can help individual, independent artists make the higher quality animations, and I want to get some of your ideas to help guide this research!

To give a sense of the sorts of things I've been looking into, let me talk a bit about my undergrad thesis. It's about procedural modelling, which is when you make a program of some kind that generates 3D models with random variations. This is useful when you want to make something that would be too tedious to do entirely by hand, like a forest or a cityscape. The idea is that you can just specify the pattern, and the computer can make a bunch of examples following the pattern. If making a program to solve this problem sounds like it's still a lot of effort, you're right! It is! And I've been trying to make incremental progress towards lowering that effort.

It's hard to describe a procedure that creates random instances of an object (such as a tree) without sometimes generating ones that look really bad (imagine one with all the branches off to one side.) It's easier to have a more relaxed generating program, but then search through the models it can make to find the good ones. My project lets artists sketch some rough curves that they want their model to look like, and a 3D model following the curves is picked in almost real time. Here's what it feels like to use:

I wrote a longer article about this if you're curious about how procedural modelling works and where this fits in. Granted, writing the program to generate tree models still isn't the easiest thing in the world, but at least once you have one, I hope a tool like this would let you tweak and sculpt in a more natural way with the immediate feedback you've come to expect from your creative tools.

So I want to know what parts of your animation workflow, both in 2D and 3D, you think could use better software. Here's a dump of ideas I have so far:

From my own experience in 2D, the most time consuming part is just drawing every frame of character animation, but that's also the most fun part and maybe the part that gives the medium its characteristic feel, so I'm not sure that automatic in-betweening is the best use of my effort. Coming in second place is perhaps colouring and shading. Filling in outlines quickly isn't super flashy, but it's the sort of thing that could be automated and would probably save people a lot of time. Going beyond that, though, we could maybe do more than just flat shading. Flat shading and cel shading, while both respectable styles, were both introduced because they're efficient for humans to do. When we aren't using a human, we have the opportunity introduce more intelligent fill tools that explore different styles, possibly aware of lighting, or automatically texturing based on some examples you provide. Maybe the computer could also help add details like fabric wrinkles, so you can just focus on drawing the broader shapes. In all cases, this wouldn't replace a human artist, but would instead be another tool in the artist's toolbox. I think things like this are the most useful when you can tweak and interact with the results and you aren't just handed a final copy from some AI.

A lot of the things I focus on in 3D tend to be related to modelling of complex scenes, because that's something I find myself slowed down on compared to 2D. I wish I had more ways to quickly sketch and lay out a scene. My undergrad work might be helpful, but it still takes a lot of effort to create model generating programs, so perhaps another area of focus could be in creating a model generator based on a few hand created examples.

What do you you all think? Let's discuss in the comments! (Also if you're in the Vancouver region in the fall and feel like testing out stuff related to this, let me know!)

Life updates

Thanks for reading this far! I've been away from Newgrounds for a while, so if you're curious, here's what I've been up to.

Last summer, for a computer graphics class, I made a short animation based on a Debussy piano piece. I didn't upload it here because it's really just a small, unassuming video. The thing that took up all my time was the fact that it's actually just a C++ program I wrote that rendered the whole thing. This means that any keyframed animation had to be typed out without an interface, effects like water ripples had to be calculated mathematically, and the movement and bounces of light reaching the virtual camera had to be programmed. I also didn't have as much time to optimize it as more mature renderers have had, so to cut down on render time, it's not full HD and it's only 12fps. I've written about the more technical aspects if you want to learn more.

I spent some time recently working at Figma on some projects like the smart selection tool so that working with designs with grids and lists can be a little easier. I'm back in school again for a while now, but I find I've just been using Figma in place of Illustrator these days. The rate of improvement is great and also it's free for students! Maybe check it out if you ever find yourself needing to design something.

I run this thing at the University of Waterloo called Terriblehack where we work on shitty projects. It just happened this past Sunday. I made a little space simulator, but where the Earth is flat.

I also have a "band" that consists of me and whoever I live with at the time, and we record shitty cover songs. We're called Don't Cross Me and our gang sign in the cross product right-hand rule. We've got a SoundCloud if you want to experience our music. We're hoping to maybe do another song this weekend (Boulevard of Broken Dreams, anyone?)