Moho Forum

I had the opportunity to attend a seminar from the stop motion animation studio Laika today. The whole thing was fascinating, but one thing I found particularly interesting was that they had something like 1.5 million different possible combinations of pre-made facial components. Even with that library of poses to draw from, when the animators went to animate a scene, they would still request new facial components to create new poses!

Looks like this was almost the same presentation: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-stor ... 01512.html

The principle of replacement parts isn't new of course. Remember those booklets with pages cut into 3 strips, each one containing a variety of eyes, noses, and mouths? Here's a modern Flash version: Monoface

This ties in nicely with ASP since switches can be used similarly. I don't think it would be millions of unique expressions, but certainly in the hundreds or thousands. (Mike Kelley even developed a mix-and-match script called "No Limits Designer".)

But yeah, Laika has taken the idea to new level and is remarkable in its sheer complexity and beauty. Really looking forward to The Boxtrolls.

Woah, monoface is crazy!! I tried to see if I could piece together a person's real face based on what looked "right," and I was way off. Using replacement for character design is a clever idea, especially in Mike Kelley's case since his series has so many characters shown at the same angle(s). It probably contributes to the clean consistent look of his series. :D

My take-away from Laika's process was almost the opposite of this - that you can't anticipate every pose you'll want to use in your animation until you're actually working in the scene. So if you are using a pre-made rig you need to at least have some flexibility to make adjustments during the animation process. Fortunately we have that with Anime Studio. But it shows the advantage of working with scene specific rigs, as Greykid did.

Of course, it depends a lot on the animation style whether things can be easily interchanged like symbols or whether poses need to be highly nuanced for a particular moment. Interesting stuff!