carotid endarterectomy!

Above is a still (well... an example of what a still would look like, if I actually rendered everything out) from an animation/animatic/thing I did for my surgical illustration class.

Here's the moving stuff:

carotid endarterectomy!

We were only required to do the still and some storyboards, but I wanted to see how far I could get on an animation in a couple weeks. I mean, this is far from complete--yes, I have no textures, and my brain and heart are egg-shaped, and there's a lot of movement that needs tweaking--but it's also pretty far beyond a simple storyboard.

Oh--some vocab for people who don't necessarily have animation experience:
Steps of an animation:

1. Script: the words that will be spoken over the animation.
2. Storyboard: 2-dimensional drawings representing the planned steps of the animation.
3. Animated storyboard (good practice, but seemingly optional): taking the images you created for your still storyboard and "animating" them, slide-show/photo album style, to your scratch track--just to give you an idea of how long each scene/view needs to be.
   
   
   • 3a. Scratch track: recorded narration that approximates what the final recorded narration will sound like. This is important if you don't have a fancy microphone or soundproof room handy, or if the final narration will be recorded by some voice actor who's currently in a different state. You don't want to wait until AFTER you've created the animation to realize your audio doesn't sync up with your video AT ALL.
   
   
   
4. Animatic: a very rough approximation of your final animation, usually using things like spheres and boxes instead of complicated models. Allows you to figure out the basic camera moves/angles and how they'll work in the final animation.
5. Animation: in a 3d situation, this is what you walk away with after you've gotten all your models, textured them, lit them, animated them, and rendered them. You'll often walk away with a bunch of render passes, too.
   
   
   • 5a. Render passes: what if your client asks you to make a cell green? Will you have to go fix that one cell, wait ANOTHER 25 hours for everything to render out, and perfectly composite everything AGAIN? Render passes allow you to find your "cell pass" and make it green in After Effects (which would be a 10-minute fix instead of a 3-day ordeal), AND you can have much better control over subtle effects like shadows, highlights, depth of field, etc.
   
   
   
   
6. Really Final Animation: Take the animations you exported from your 3d program and compile everything/ edit everything/ make everything look spectacularly awesome in an awesome-video-making program like After Effects.

...Now I just need to actually do the animation for my Animation Class. Which will be pretty awesome when I'm done with it, I hope!



[Poser (man model), Osirix (artery model), Adobe Illustrator (beginnings of instruments), 3ds Max 2009 (most of the heavy work), Adobe Soundbooth (narration), Adobe Premiere (putting the animation together), Adobe Photoshop (still compositing)]