# answers to email questions related to 3D animation Here are answers to some of your questions. I hope there is something of value for you. I have a bunch of content on my website related to [animation](https://mister-chad.com/animation/!+animation), as well as intros to using [Autodesk Maya](https://mister-chad.com/3d+modeling+-+maya/!+3d+modeling-+maya) and [Adobe Substance](https://mister-chad.com/3d+modeling+-+substance/!+3d+modeling+-+substance). These are resources for classes I've taught and so there are tons of links and extras that may help your learning. **What is a good art style for animation in your opinion?** I think style is completely up to the artist and/or production team depending on what they are trying to say. We have reached a point where it is technically possible to create photorealistic imagery and fully believable visual effects. That's boring, though, so I'm happy that there is now a push toward creating stylized animation. Why make realism when you can make stuff that looks cool instead? Recent movies like The Wild Robot show that you can do amazing storytelling with a stylized cartoonish look. All the Pixar movies have a great visual style even when representing fairly normal reality. Much more interesting to look at and better for narrative control. **How much and is there any editing needed and if so what kind?** Sure, there's the regular editing done like any movie. You are rendering sequences and then chopping and assembling those sequences. It is much harder to get the sequences because everything needs to be built and programmed. In a live action movie, you can just have the actors do another take if something doesn't work. In 3D animation, you have to go back and manipulate a lot of things to get another take. There's also Compositing, which is another big deal. Rarely do you get a perfect shot in the digital camera. Usually what happens is you take many shots of the same scene with different setups. You might do a color pass, another for shadows, another for highlights, another for depth of field for focal levels, etc. Some of those sequences are used as masks to isolate sections of other shots. Compositing is all about adding all those layers together to build the final shot you see when watching the movie. In a big production, it is easily possible to have twenty or thirty different elements composited together for one sequence. **Is there any pre-production that goes into 3D animation?** An absolute ton of pre-production work is done in 3D animation, far more than any other medium. There's a reason why the end credits of a 3D movie are twice as long as a regular movie. It can take years and years for a production to make it to the screen. Check out [The Art of Animation](https://characterdesignreferences.com/art-of-animation)section at [Character Design References](https://characterdesignreferences.com/). That gives a nice detailed look at some of the work that goes into developing visuals for both 2D and 3D movies. 3D is more work because you have to build and paint models for everything from characters to sets to props, rig the models as puppets and actually animate them, as well as develop lighting and set up camera shots and VFX work. This is in addition to all the visual development work, storyboards, and animatics stuff which isn't directly 3D but integral to a production. The teams and skillsets required are vast. A random thing: I once met the person who worked on fabrics for the movie Brave. She was an expert in fabrics and materials, especially medieval Celtic stuff. She was brought on as an advisor for the movie to get the clothing and tapestries right. Imagine experts needed to advise and build stuff for all the little details in a whole animated universe. **What FPS do you animate at and does is FPS still important with 3D animation?** Frames Per Second are important. The standard has been 24 FPS, something developed by Walt Disney way back when animation was a new industry. It was found that less than 24 created choppy images that didn't quite flow right. More was better but involved much more drawing and so it wasn't cost-effective. Neat side-fact: Mickey Mouse and friends have three fingers instead of four because you could still show all the needed hand-gestures and could save money by not drawing that extra finger twenty four times per second of animation. These days, we can render more frames per second but tend to stick with no more than 30 fps. Again, financially, it is much cheaper because you don't need to render as many scenes (and rendering can take a really long time for each frame). The upshot of smoother animation doesn't make up for the amount of time and resources needed. A related concept is [Frame Rate](https://mister-chad.com/animation/animating+on+the+ones%2C+two%2C+and+threes). Making 24 frames is a lot of work. Animating only ever other frame can still look good and it will cut your time in half since you are only making 12 frames. If the action can still look good at 12 frames then you go with that. In Spiderman Across The Spiderverse (amazing movie), they played with this in an interesting way. There's a scene where Miles is learning to swing on his webs as he follows Spiderman through the forest. The animators made Spiderman nice and smooth while Miles is staggered and choppy and out of sync. As he figures it out, his Frame Rate matches up with Spiderman and they are both nice and smooth by the end. **Is there any key differences between 2D and 3D animation that you know of?** Both have very different workflows and processes, although lately there has been a nice integration between the two. Blender has [Grease Pencil](https://www.blender.org/features/story-artist/) that lets you animate 2D elements in 3D space. South Park which is 2D paper cutout style is actually animated in Maya, a 3D program. The camera is pointing down and the animators can pick pieces up and move them around in 3D for layering. For a long time, animators have used 3D to block out spatial stuff and then trace over with 2D tools. So 3D is used as a tool. Mostly, though, the big difference between 2D and 3D is that you can cheat quite a bit in 2D. It is drawings and you only have to draw what you see. Yes, the drawings can be complex and detailed, but you are only drawing what you need to draw. In 3D, you need to fully build the worlds and paint and light them. In 2D, you might only need to see the side of a characters face so you only draw that. In 3D, you need to build out the character in more detail so that the side of the face looks right, then paint them, add materials, light them, etc. All that extra work for for a similar shot. There is a trick called Stage Setting where you only build what you will see in-camera. Even big productions like Disney and Pixar movies will have false fronts like a theater stage show. Buildings in the distance might be flat cardboard cutouts and building closer up might be simple cubes with materials added. Unless you are going into a building, you aren't going to make the interiors. If you only ever look one way down a street, I guarantee you they didn't build stuff in the other direction. There may be stuff behind the camera that adds shadows that appear on-camera and props might be back there ready to be moved into the scene, but that's about it.