Animation Pipeline - Production

After planning your idea, and going through the pre-production line, the next few steps are as follows:

In 2D animation, you start making a rough animation of the characters, background objects, etc, following from the animatic that was made beforehand. once the scene is approved, it can be refined and coloured into a full animation.

If you are making a 3D animated film, you need to start making layouts of what is needed in the animation (characters, objects, backgrounds, etc). once you've laid out everything, you can model the characters and objects you need in the scene. the character needs to be fully functional, in that the model requires bones and joints to help the animator move the character around and give more life into it.  once the models are approved, you can add colour and texturing to the character to give it more personality and edge to the story.  the textures can be a combination of simple plain colours, otherwise a more advanced texture would be needed to show the depth of the character or object. for example, the character's skin - what tone would it have? how much hair does it require. if it's an animal, does it have fur?

When you start rendering a test run, you'll see the animation is quite dark. Therefore, some lighting is needed in the 3D animation to highlight the contrast of the character, scenery, anywhere that's important. there are a series of lights which can be used on any 3D software, such as spotlights, which will help brighten or darken the scene you are working on. once the lighting is fixed, you can rig the rough animation, to see if any specified changes are needed. Then once it's approved, it can moved on to the Post-Production process.