Flying Bark Productions
3D Animation 101
How computer-animated features and series actually get made. From a blank page to a finished frame.
Four moments on this page have sound
The 3D animation pipeline is fairly standardised across the industry. The steps: develop the story, build the assets, produce the shots, is much the same wherever you go, and an artist moving between studios will recognise the work immediately.
What varies is the vocabulary and where the lines between departments are drawn. One studio's surfacing is another's look development. Effects might be a single department or three. A task that sits with layout in one studio sits with animation in another. None of that changes what actually has to happen to get a show finished. It just changes what it's called and who it's done by.
Whether it is a feature or a series, a 3D animated production is built in three broad phases:
These phases overlap and interact with each other. Story keeps evolving while models are being built. Lighting starts on early sequences while animation is still being worked on later ones.
Wheather it's a film, a series or some other format, the departments involved are the same. What changes is the rhythm. A feature typically runs four to five years from first pitch to release, building towards a single delivery. A series builds its assets once and then runs them through the pipeline again and again, episode after episode.
What follows is the Flying Bark version: our terminology, our department boundaries, and the way we run a show.
Phase One
Development
Before anything is built, the show has to be worked out. On paper, in a recording booth, and on a timeline.
Animatics
The animatic is the first visual representation of the script. Artists draw thousands of storyboard panels, which are cut against the recorded dialogue into a rough moving version of the film or episode. Sometimes there will be rough 3D sets that the artists can use, sometimes they have to draw those too. The animatic is the first point at which anyone can actually watch it, and it is screened, discussed and revised repeatedly. Sequences are frequently re-boarded from scratch. Nothing moves downstream until a sequence works here, because fixing a story problem in an animatic costs days and fixing it after animation costs months.
Design
Concept artists establish how the show looks and feels: character designs, colour scripts, environments, costume, lighting keys, graphic language. This is where the show's identity is set, long before anything is built in 3D. A series has to design for longevity. The look has to be producable at scale, and the cast and world has to hold up across many episodes.
Other artwork focuses on the specifics. How does the character look from every angle? What expressions do they have? How do they move? What do their clothes and accessories look like?
Design
The playground
Colour concepts imagine the set before anything is modelled. The powerline tower and the squid climbing frame in these paintings are the same ones standing in the finished shot.
Phase Two
Asset creation
Building a digital world.
This is where we create our world. Where possible, we try to build once and use many times. That is true of a feature, and it is the whole economic basis of a series: the cost of building a character is spread across every episode it appears in.
Modelling
Characters, props and environments are built as 3D geometry, translating a 2D design into something that reads correctly from every angle. Modellers are the sculptors of the pipeline. A design that works in a single drawing often has to be reinterpreted to hold up in three dimensions.
Surfacing
What each model is made of. Texture painting, shader authoring, and how materials respond to light. Skin, fur, wet stone, worn brass. Surfacing artists work closely with lighting, since a surface only exists in relation to the light hitting it.
Surfacing
Sets
A set has to work from many angles. The same materials may have to hold up in a wide establishing view, or extreme closeups.
Rigging
Each model is given a rig - an internal skeleton with a set of controls an animator can actually pose. A good rig is expressive enough for the performance and fast enough to work with interactively. Rigging is critical. Every animator on the show depoends on it.
Before it is handed over a rig goes through a range of motion test. Every control is driven to its extremes to make sure the character can perform the way they need to for the story. Cycles come next and are the first time the rig has to act. Each one is reviewed from several cameras at once because they have to work from any angle.
3D FX
A reusable effects toolkit is built before shots need it: fire, water, smoke, dust, magic, destruction, weather, etc. These setups can be dropped into a shot and tuned rather than rebuilt from scratch each time. The often involve complex physics simulation, guided and enhanced by the skill of the artist.
Phase Three
Shot production
Bringing the story to life.
Story is the audience's total experience of what they are seeing. The goal in shot production is to put the best version of the story on the screen that we can.
Layout
Cameras, sets and character positions are established scene-by-scene and shot-by-shot, translating the animatic into actual 3D staging. This is where we work out lensing, framing, continuity, and performance timing before animation begins.
That can be harder than it sounds. A drawing is not bound by a camera. A board artist can cheat perspective, put the viewer where no lens would fit, draw a character slightly larger than the staging strictly allows because it reads better, or imply a move no real camera could make. Layout has to produce the same feeling using an actual lens on an actual set. And where the drawing can't be reproduced literally, work out the best compromise to tell the story.
Animation
The performance. Animators pose characters over time to create movement, dialogue, and emotion. The animator is the actor.
The work is done in in two stages:
Blocking establishes the performance in key poses. The animator sets the positions that carry the storytelling - where the weight shifts, where the eyeline goes, where a beat lands. It looks deliberately unfinished: the character snaps from pose to pose. That is the point. Blocking is where the acting choices get argued about, because a pose is cheap to move and finished motion is not. Nothing goes forward until the blocking is approved.
Final turns those poses into continuous motion - adding what the key poses only implied: overlap, follow-through, settle, the small timing offsets that stop a character reading as one rigid object.
3D FX
Simulated effects are created for each shot from the setups built earlier and tuned by the artists to meet the needs of the story.
Lighting
Lights are placed and balanced to deliver mood, and create the sense of being in the world. Lighting determines where the eye goes and how the shot feels, and it inherits every decision made upstream.
The lighting department is also responsible for rendering the shot, which is the process of calculating how our virtual frame should actually look, one pixel at a time. It can take many hours to render a single frame.
Compositing
Every rendered element is combined into a single image. Compositors balance layers, and integrate everything so it sits in the same world. They make final adjustments to, atmosphere colour and focus. They add subtle optical elements to replicate the look of real lenses. This is where the shot stops being a collection of passes and becomes cinematic.