New books on animation!

Focal Press just released some very cool books on digital character animation. 'Character Animation Fundamentals' by Steve Roberts was published this week and uses traditional 2D animation concepts while showing you how to apply them when designing digital characters in 3D space. Roberts has been working in animation for over 25 years, which won him two IVCA awards and the New York Film and Television Award. He is currently Senior lecturer in Character Animation at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, formerly known as the 'London Animation Studio' and part of the six colleges that make up the 'University of the Arts London'. Roberts has worked for Disney, Warner Brothers and the BBC and explains all about his traditional and digital workflow in his latest book. The companion website includes 20 fully built and rigged models which you can use to animate with and more than 50 tutorials, teaching you how to build and animate these. It also has 140 2D and 3D animated movies as examples.

Another title you might enjoy is Lee Montgomery's 'Tradigital Maya', which was published on November 15th. As with Steve Roberts' book, this one too uses traditional animation principles to learn you character animation and develop your skills in 3D animation, specifically in Maya.

Although many aspects of the techniques discussed by Montgomery will of course also translate to other animation software, this book is part of a series of 'tradigital' books, which also features other software specific titles 'Tradigital Blender' by Roland Hess and 'Tradigital 3ds Max by Richard Lapidus, both published earlier in June and October. Montgomery has worked as key animator on Rockstar's succesfull video games series 'Grand Theft Auto' and 'Manhunt' and is currently senior level member of Autodesk Media & entertainment software support team, while also being an active moderator of Autodesk's AREA forum. Many of the techniques used and provided by Montgomery rely of  Disney's 12 fundamental principles of animation, as featured in Frank Tomas and Ollie Johnson's 'Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life', which is highly regarded by the industry as the bible on character animation. If you don't have it, you should definately consider buying that first.







Above: the principles of animating a character apply to any given object. Whether it's a person, an animal or even a jet fighter, as Montgomery thoroughly demonstrates in his new book. Below: first published in 1981, 'The Illusion of Life' is still the must-have classic on animation. Written by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson (below seated), two of Disney's 'Nine Old Men', master animators on many of Disney's classic animated features, such as 'Pinocchio', 'Bambi' and 'Cinderella'.