The uses of python and programming in general in the animation industry

Python is a popular high-level programming language and I've started studying it for a few reasons. When thinking of programming and computer science in general, the link to animation can be looked at in two ways.

Either not at all or very much, however I'm confident that programming is very beneficial to a range of jobs in animations. Maybe not so much to an animator, who just focuses on how to get movements of the characters looking natural and believable. if scripts are used in this process all he does is use the GUI(graphical user interface) of the tool to not disrupt him from the fluid process of animating.

However if the animator is working on a 3d animation using a 3d animation software such as Maya, then the tools he is using to create this fluid natural animation relies on inputs of various data. For example, a character rig in maya has joints connected to the mesh to move the character and lets say the wrist joint is rotated by 97Degrees and the controller which controls where the eyes aim is translated from position x:7,y:4,z:9 to  x:-1,y:-2,z:-7.

These values mean nothing to an animator. Even if the animator can eventually work out how far the joints/controllers have moved, the fluid process of animating natural movements has been broken by the animator having to manually work in numerical data. This is why the GUI of maya exists, to visualize the flow of data inside the program so that the animator can animate seamlessly without breaking the fluidity of the animating process.

Alot of animation companies have programmers to design pipeline tools to improve that which i have just described, letting the animator work creatively without exerting too much analytical concentration.

This is why big animation companies like Disney and Dreamworks use the same basic tools such as maya, zbrush. But due to the custom scripts and even custom software created by programmers working for these companies, the software can be used in different ways.

For example in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, the rigs were very complex with around 4000 controls, the animators need to be able to effectively and efficiently create an emotional performance from the rig, this is where custom scrips and custom software takes effect. 'A typical dragon required something like 4000 controls, half of which typically are in the face...getting those into a form where the animators could create performances from them was challenging'.

In conclusion i have decided to learn Python because programming plays an important part in the process of making an animation, it can produce tools to make the animation process more fluid and can also automate processes to make production quicker which is important when time is limited due to a deadline.




References:
Dreamworks,. How To Train Your Dragon - Tools & Software Optimization (2010Th Year). 2013. Web. 16 Jan. 2017.