The Animation Pipeline

3-D Layout

Once you have a proxy, it is going to go through the 3-D layout process, which is a 3-D mockup of the storyboard. The proxy may be processed by a couple of desks before can be considered a 3-D animation. The animators fill in detail about camera angles, distances, or the scale of the character to its environment before sending the proxy and its rigging back into the animation process.

For items other than animation, this process of filling in the detail is sometimes called stepwise refinement.

This allows the storyboard to drive the creation process. For every big frame or for every big scene, for everything the character can do or encounter, you have to go through these processes:

• figure out where the character is
• What the character looks like
• What the character is wearing
• What the friends of the character look like (the band)
• Where the light sources are and what highlights they create
• What shadows are cast from which light sources

All of those things have to happen in 2 and 3 dimensions, a storyboard at a time.

You may want to have a storyboard for each mission, or for each goal within a mission. This helps organize game development when there might be several rooms to storyboard for each goal.