Dive into the captivating world of 2D animation with 'Animating Imagination,' a comprehensive guide to mastering the art of animation. From the rich history of animation to the latest digital tools and techniques, this book covers everything you need to know to bring your imagination to life on the screen. Explore the principles of character animation, craft dynamic environments, and learn how to incorporate sound and music to enhance your storytelling. With practical insights, hands-on exercises, and expert advice, 'Animating Imagination' is your essential companion on the journey to becoming a skilled 2D animator. Whether you're a seasoned professional or a novice enthusiast, this book will inspire and empower you to create captivating animations that captivate audiences and leave a lasting impression.

Francis Glebas, a top Disney storyboard artist, shows how to reach the ultimate goal of animation and moviemaking by showing how to provide audiences with an emotionally satisfying experience. Directing the Story offers a structural approach to clearly and dramatically presenting visual stories. With Francis' help you'll discover the professional storytelling techniques which have swept away generations of movie goers and kept them coming back for more. You'll also learn to spot potential problems before they cost you time or money and offers creative solutions to solve them. Best of all, it practices what it preaches, using a graphic novel format to demonstrate the professional visual storytelling techniques you need to know.

Detailed text and drawings illuminate how to conceive animated characters.

"A manual of methods, principles and formulas for classical, computer, games, stop motion and internet animators"--Cover.

Annotation Blender is an open source 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, rigging, animating, rendering and thousands of other things. While modeling characters isn't the biggest of your worries, animating them to make them feel as-good-as alive is what differentiates a professional from an amateur. This book offers clear, illustrative, and easy-to-follow recipes to create character rigs and animations for common situations. Bring your characters to life by understanding the principles, techniques and approaches involved in creating rigs and animations, you'll be able to adapt them to your own characters and films. The book offers clear step-by-step tutorials, with detailed explanations, screenshots and support files to help you understand the principles behind each topic. Each recipe covers a logical step of the complete creation of a character rig and animation, so you're not overwhelmed with too much information at once. You'll see numerous examples and screenshots that guide to achieve various rigging and animation tasks, logically separated so you can understand each in detail. The rigging topics are divided by each region of the body (torso, limbs, face, eyes), and further separated by the specific topic (neck, fingers, mouth, eyelids, etc) for clarity. All rigging tasks are accomplished with the built-in tools in Blender, without the complexity of coding custom Python behaviors or user interface elements. The animation topics deal with common situations found in real world productions, showing good practices to understand and overcome the challenges.

"Learn all the tips and tricks of the trade from the professionals. Highly illustrated throughout, points made in the text are demonstrated with the help of numerous superb drawn examples."--

BlenderTM is a free Open Source 3D Creation Suite supporting the entire modeling and animation pipeline – modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. The program also includes Video Editing and Grease Pencil 2D Animation. The program is free to download and use by anyone for anything. The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics: Modeling and Animation, 5th Edition is a unified manual describing the operation of Blender version 2.80 with its New Improved Interface, New Workspaces and New Eevee Render System. This book introduces the program's Graphical User Interface and shows how to implement tools for modeling and animating characters and creating scenes with the application of color, texture and special lighting effects. Key Features: The book is designed to lead new users into the world of computer graphics using Blender 2.80 and to be a reference for established Blender artists. The book presents instruction in a series of short chapters with visual references and practical examples. Instructions are structured in a building-block fashion using contents in earlier chapters to explain more complex operations in later chapters.

Make the Most of Today’s Leading Animation Package With release 4, max further establishes itself as today’s dominant modeling, animation, and rendering package. And with its fully revised and updated coverage, Mastering 3ds max 4 further establishes itself as the definitive max resource--just the book you need to master all the techniques supported by this powerful product. Inside, you’ll learn all about sculpting and texturing your characters, setting them in motion, lighting the scene, and producing the final animation--for movies, games, television, and the Web. You also get in-depth instruction in MAXScript, including detailed explanations of all that’s new to this release. Coverage includes: Understanding basic 3D concepts Modeling in polygons, patches, and NURBS Creating detailed models Optimizing models for low-poly environments Applying textures for real-time and pre-rendered output Animating using parametric animation, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, and character studio Fine-tuning animation by editing keys and transitions Creating drama with lighting Applying post-process effects Cutting and cross-fading between shots Compositing in Video Post and combustion Exporting to Web 3D with Pulse Getting started with MAXScript Using scripting for scene manipulation Using scripting for animation Customizing the user interface Defining autostart scripts Creating your own plug-ins using MAXScript

Packed with illustrations, this book explains the methods and techniques of animation preproduction, with a focus on story development and character design.

Just add talent! Award-winning animator Tony White brings you the ultimate book for digital animation. Here you will find the classic knowledge of many legendary techniques revealed, paired with information relevant to today's capable, state-of-the-art technologies. White leaves nothing out. What contemporary digital animators most need to know can be found between this book's covers - from conceptions to creation and through the many stages of the production pipeline to distribution. This book is intended to serve as your one-stop how-to animation guide. Whether you're new to animation or a very experienced digital animator, here you'll find fundamentals, key classical techniques, and professional advice that will strengthen your work and well-roundedness as an animator. Speaking from experience, White presents time-honored secrets of professional animaton with a warm, masterly, and knowledgeable approach that has evolved from over 30 years as an award-winning animator/director. The book's enclosed downloadable resources presents classic moments from animation's history through White's personal homage to traditional drawn animation, "Endangered Species." Using movie clips and still images from the film, White shares the 'making of' journal of the film, detailing each step, with scene-by-scene descriptions, technique by technique. Look for the repetitive stress disorder guide on the downloadable resources, called, "Mega-hurts." Watch the many movie clips for insights into the versatility that a traditional, pencil-drawn approach to animaton can offer.