This exercise is an opportunity to do some drafts of your animation without having to incur really long render times. In traditional animation a pencil test was a film of all the drawings before inking and coloring on cels. It was done to catch any errors before committing to the effort of making the final art.
You don’t need to render all the frames of your animation. You may wish to try out a different camera angle for a range of frames, for example, or try out some rendering options (like toon shading, maybe motion blur or depth of field). But mostly you’ll want to check your animation - is the character moving too fast? too slow? unintended collision with other objects? feet on the ground, or floating?
In the render tab of Blender under the preset for TV NTSC, you’ll see that you can reduce the frame size of the rendering by a percent you choose. 50% will speed up rendering a lot, but will still give you a video big enough to see important details. You can also speed up render time by turning off things like material properties (transparency, reflection), shadows etc.
You’ll need to name the file you’re going to render and pick a location on disk. You should select FFmpeg video as the format and then under the Encoding tab you can choose a container (eg. Quicktime) and a codec (eg. .mp4 or h.264). Compression quality isn’t that important at this stage, but for the final render it should be 100%.
Upload your draft(s) to your web site and email the URL to intromm@cs.stonybrook.edu, with “Pencil Test” in the subject line.
Rubric:
1. Followed the instructions:
• Rendered video clip(s), approx. 320 X 240 were uploaded to the the student’s web site, and a URL was sent to course email.
2. Met the design criteria:
• The video clip has a walk cycle or character movement, or an object moving along a path (camera, vehicle…) or both.
• The motion is smooth.
• The movement is timed appropriately (character or object does not move too fast or slow).
• No unintended collisions with objects in the scene.
• Movement is believable (character is not “floating” or “drifting”, does not move or bend in an awkward way).
• The camera view is appropriate for the scene (and the animation is not inadvertently clipped).
• Pencil test leverages some principle of animation (eg. ease-in/out, squash and stretch, anticipation and follow-through, etc).
• Animation is not redundant (ie. camera endlessly revolving around an object).
• Good technical execution overall.
That’s 10 criteria, or approximately 1 point each. (10 points total)