Skip to main content
anonyms
anonyms
Known Participant
February 7, 2023
Under Review

Provide more diverse and professional examples

  • February 7, 2023
  • 7 replies
  • 1218 views
I am a professor of art with an MFA in animation specifically. I need to see more examples provided which reflect the competency in figure drawing we encourage students to aspire and practice. Currently, that is not reflected in the examples provided. Additionally, where diversity is portrayed, diversity includes age. By restricting your examples to those that depict generally teenagers and children, you send a message we in art programs in art schools and colleges let alone education and the motion picture industry are trying to change. Individuals and companies are judged by actions vs words. This is one area the CH design team needs to improve. Suggestion: consult your UX folks. This is a key concept in usability engineering right now.

    7 replies

    anonyms
    anonymsAuthor
    Known Participant
    March 22, 2023

    Agree completely. Adobe, come on now... We want people to be encouraged and nudged to level up, not down.

    LR

    ericc19576445
    ericc19576445
    Known Participant
    March 22, 2023

    Thank you for pointing this out. It's very discouraging when both the art and animatics made by Adobe are not at an inspirational level of quality. It's very dificult to see what the software is capable of with subpar animatics. My rigs are currently better than what I'm seeing from Adobe in both categories. Currently I'm roadblocked from making a ground breaking setup due to limitations in the software. I am now (after a year of struggling through trial and error due to a lack of good resources/documentaion) considering going back to traditional frame by frame animation. Adobe CA is a novelty that falls short in way too many situations that have been solved for longer than 10 years by After Effects, Animate/Flash, and of course most non Adobe animation softwares. I have determined that if I want to be able to use CA to help with workflow, I end up wasting that saved time on trying to push the software past the miminal amount of reference material. It has no logic outside of the narrow scope it was designed for. What if a character has 2 heads, 3 arms, etc? This software doesn't operate past the body parts of a normal human and also still lacks the movement I could obtain myself if I was just using bones and pins. 

     

    The lack of ability to have a child interact outside of it's parent is so extremely limiting. The lack of extended features and support for cycle layers is also very disappointing.

     

    Example: a cycle layer that would reach a character's hand into their pocket fails because I can't pin the last frame of the cycle layer to the leg when the cycle ends. I can't make a cycle layer that lifts arms over the head and engage leader/follower to engage the shoulder movement. Most of your behaviors only work with draggables and your draggable behavior is so flawed and unnatural and limits scalability.

     

    Also... scalability.... You shouldn't have to concern yourself with the amount of layers or size of art if you are only using less than 25% of your computer's resources, but with CA the bottleneck isn't your computer, it's poor software architecture. I can't make a puppet worth a crap without bogging down the fps to an unusable amount. This ends up making us have to make several variants of a puppet (standing, sitting, walking, etc) and because CA makes copying and pasting behaviors, handles, etc impossible, it just increases the workload to an amount way past the amount of time saved animating manually. 

     

    Unfortunately, in it's current state, CA is a novelty, a toy for tiktokers, not a tool for animators.

    anonyms
    anonymsAuthor
    Known Participant
    February 14, 2023

    Replying to 'Sirr':

    Examples that we in academia et al might reference for demonstrating 'competency in figure drawing' can be found in the work and even demos on YouTube of veterans such as Karl Gnass, Glen Vilppu, and other well known masters who in the past were employed by the Animation Guild and studios including Disney to assist in supporting in house creatives such as concept artists, animators, et al.

     

    As a professor myself, I look for figure drawings where I can see the individual understands human anatomy, basics in rendering perspective, and of course essentials such as proportion.

     

    I hope this helps to answer your question.

     

    L Rose, M.F.A.

    T
    Tim27898261hm38
    Inspiring
    February 14, 2023

    Hey Sirr, the link you provided to earlier shared puppets is a dead link. Please fix.

    S
    Community Manager
    SirrCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    February 7, 2023
    @2005128 Rose, you'll get no argument on the diversity front and keep an eye on the blog - https://theblog.adobe.com/creative-cloud/character-animator/ - as we add new puppets. You also can find some less age specific examples in our earlier shared puppets here: https://character.adobelanding.com/puppets/

    In regard to the drawing styles, would you be kind enough to post a couple examples of the types of artwork that indicate the competency in figure drawing you're describing? While we always strive to make people aware of how many styles can be brought into the app, it would help to have the particular perspective to discuss. Thanks!
    anonyms
    anonymsAuthor
    Known Participant
    February 7, 2023
    PS ...One more thing in response to your request. I remember my teachers and my dad telling me about dead giveaways the the person was not that proficient in drawing the figure: I see that now more clearly and immediately than ever before and I now look for these things when I jury a show or evaluate a portfolio et al:

    - Repeatedly hiding hands and feet
    - Little differentiation in the character, personality, characteristics of a figure (less skilled artists will tend to draw figures that look like themselves - variations in age, gender, race, etc. tend to be absent; competent artists truly can step out of themselves and portray characters young, old, multi-racial - and not just via color - etc.)

    I hope that helps to give you an idea of how competency actually is evaluated by those of us who have been at this for long enough to have gone from drawing on an animation disk and shooting animation onto 35mm sprocketed film to the range of Adobe tools which mimic and expand upon these historic tools.

    Some 30 years ago I stood in a small room in Mountain View while a couple of people showed me something that turned pixels into paths. They asked me what I thought and if I had any suggestions for product names. That product is today Adobe Illustrator. And of Adobe AfterEffects, I was brought on by Apple in 1986 to experiment with some animation software written by Mark Cantor. Today, that software is in fact AE. And lastly, I actually produced and created the very first animated film created ENTIRELY on an Apple Macintosh - I drew every 'frame' using a mouse and fried the primitive version of a hard drive in that old Mac Apple gave me to play with for a year. I did this little film for Tandem Computers (history).

    History is useful - and I hope I've helped you in moving forward in developing CH.

    Best,
    Lisa Rose
    anonyms
    anonymsAuthor
    Known Participant
    February 7, 2023
    Competency in figure drawing (critical in animation still today) are immediately evident in an artist's representation of hands and feet (in different gestures), accuracy in differentiating character and personality, and all of this multiplied by the challenge of depiction in 3, 4, and more point perspective.

    For animation, these skills are absolutely critical. If you cannot depict a hand competently, you won't be able to rig it well. This is why at CalArts even today, animation students still draw the human figure using classical techniques going back more than 100 years and all of us continue to draw from the figure regularly just like athletes workout to maintain their skill level.

    I would suggest for contemporary examples of competency in figure drawing - re people alive today, check out Karl Gnass of the Screen Cartoonist Guild. He runs the regular drawing sessions and classes there and that's where animators in Hollywood go to maintain their competency.

    Animators like Richard Williams (no longer on the planet), my own teacher - Corny Cole and Gerard Baldwin, Moe Golub, and my own dad as well (David Rose - all these old masters are gone now... another reason I double down on this when I teach) are animators whose style and fluency in animation and strong character design reflected a basic mastery in the classical skills of drawing the figure. Another animator working today whose competency in drawing the figure is a great example is Mark Kirkland (Simpsons - if you look at his figure drawings and then look at his work on the Simpsons, you will see how his competency level in this fundamental skill supports the Simpsons work he does).

    I hope that helps.

    Lisa Rose
    M.F.A., Animation
    Professor of Art

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices