Monday, December 1, 2008

What Are Splines? What’s the Best Way to Approach Editing Splines When Animating?

Before I go into this topic, I wanted to mention that I think Victor Navone provides some really good tips and tricks on his website
(http://www.navone.org/HTML/Tutorials.htm) for splining.

So go check it out! I’d listen to that before any of my nonsense.

So…if your still here, here’s my 2 cents!

I find that this is a particularly difficult topic to talk about. Mainly because everyone I know does it a different way. Some animators never look at their splines, some use lots of keys on their splines, and some use only a few keys and rely on weighted tangents. There is no right and wrong way. Teachers may try and tell you there is, but that’s only because they see it works for them and they might think everyone will enjoy the same success. Unfortunately, I’ve learned it doesn’t work that way. All that matters is what’s on screen, not how it looks in your graph editor. So be sure you find a way that works for you and use it, even if it makes no sense to anyone else.

When it comes to my workflow, I don’t look at my graph editor until my blocking is pretty much complete. I make sure that all the acting and action that is supposed to take place in my shot happens in blocking. I am personally unable to define actions through splining. So when I take my shot from blocking to spline, that is the first time I take a look at the spaghetti mess in my graph editor. Luckily, since I’ve already laid down a lot of keys in my blocking (key pose, breakdowns, ease in’s and outs, overshoots, settles), I can roughly see an overall direction that my splines are traveling in. For some splines, all I have to do is clean them up so that they flow nicely. But most require a lot of attention.

The thing that really helped me to understand my splines is thinking of them like a roller coaster ride and the spline is the track the cars follow on. It can be fast, slow, it can have a big building anticipation followed by a quick action, take sharp turns and stop abruptly. The track is mainly a smooth track and even the sharpest of corners are rounded. Rarely are there any arbitrary sharp angles or jittery textures. It’s because the cars have weight. If halfway through the ride the track hit a 90 degree turn, it would be like hitting a wall, and it would remove all feeling of weight. So would your animation. Weight effects everything, including how your curves start and stop. It takes some effort to get the cars moving and even more to get them to stop. Remember how it feels going up the incline and then having gravity catch up to you on the fall, and then remember what that track looks like. Your spline for that may look the same in Trans Y.

Some tidbits I’ve learned along the way:

Labels: Nick Bruno, splines

Posted at 1:40 PM 6 comments

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

What's the Exact Difference Between Overlap and Follow-through?

Labels: follow-through, shawn

Posted at 2:07 PM 5 comments

Monday, November 24, 2008

What Steps Do You Go Through to Get into Your Characters Mind?

To really get into a characters head and really feel what they feel I ask myself a lot of questions. I’ve broken it down to my own personal steps.

Step 1: Draw from your own experiences

• When have you been in a similar situation?
• How did you feel?
• How did you carry yourself?
• How did you want others to perceive you?
• What were you doing?
• How were the people around you acting?
• What got you into that situation?
• What were you thinking vs. what you were saying?
• What environment were you in and how did that affect you? Example: A fight with a girlfriend in your living room will be different than at the library.

Step 2: Who is the Character Your Animating

• What is your characters personality?
• Where are they in their arc in the movie? Example: In the beginning they are weak but in the end they are powerful.
• How do they carry themselves
• If you could, can you equate them to an animal. Example: A shy person may try to hide themselves like turtle.
• Are they an animal? What are some physical or personality traits of that animal?
• Do you know anyone like that character?
• How does that character act differently to different people? For example, you may act differently around your friends than you would around your grandparents.
• Are they similar to any well-known movie icons? For example, if you had a confident character are they more like Indian Jones or Ace Venture. Both confident but completely different.
• Height and Weight. If your character is pregnant how may she walk differently through a crowd than say a non-pregnant woman of the same age and demeanor?

Step 3: What are the characters physical limitations

When if at all possible, do whatever you can that may physically force you to see the world through the characters perspective. If your character is blind, blindfold yourself, if they are short crawl around on your knees, if they walk with a limp put a tack in your shoe. Don’t do that for real that would hurt.

So many acting choices come from these limitations. For example, a man who is deaf in one ear will always lean toward you favoring his good ear.

Step 4: Act it out

This can also be the first thing you do. Nothing gets you in a characters frame of mind more than putting yourself in their shoes. Granted, nine times out of 10 you want to know and feel what they feel before you act it out, but act it out from a physical stand point. Recreating the situation/environment can tell you a lot. For example, if it’s a teacher in a classroom,they have desks and dropped pencils to maneuver around, so set up a few props and see how you move around that space. Then do it again later when you think you understand the character better.

Guest blogger Nick Bruno

Labels: characters, Nick Bruno

Posted at 10:03 AM 2 comments

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Reader’s Question: “Breaking the Joints” in 2D and 3D Animation?

Richard Williams' "Animator's Survival Kit" talks a lot about the topic of "breaking the joints." I'm wondering if this is a technique that is exclusive to 2D animation or if it is used in 3D animation as well?

If so, can you elaborate on how it is used and maybe provide some specific examples?

This question comes from Jason. Great question! Thanks for coming by the blog Jason!

Breaking of joints, also often called "Sequential breaking of joints," or "successive breaking of joints," is basically a way of looking at your body mechanics as though it were a chain of events, or a series of joints where each joint affects the joint beneath it (and/or above it).

The classic example of this is in looking at a blade of grass or a cracking whip, where you could imagine the blade of grass blowing in the wind as being made up of a bunch of tiny sections which affect and move each other. Same with the whip. You could think of the tip of the whip as the very end of a series of "sections" or "joints," that snake all the way back up through the whip, into the hand, the wrist, the forearm, the upper arm, the shoulder, the chest, down the spine, and all the way to the hips. The hips are probably originating the whip action, and it propagates upward and outward from there, building in force and power until the tip of that whip actually breaks the sound barrier and makes that loud cracking sound.

The "blade of grass blowing in the wind" works the same way our spine might work as we're riding a bucking horse or doing any one of a huge list of actions that would originate in our hips (the base of the "blade of grass") and move upward with each section or "joint," having overlapped timing and creating follow-through action.

This idea is essential to creating a strong sense of internal force in your body mechanics, as well as nice follow-through, strong arcs, anticipation, weight, etc. It's one of the most fundamental concepts of animation and affects any number of other animation principles, so it's definitely something to continue investigating!

Shawn :)

Labels: breaking the joints, shawn

Posted at 9:59 AM 9 comments

Monday, November 17, 2008

Tips & Tricks on How to Make a Shot Stand Out

Before you try to make your shot stand out it's important to remember the type of shot it is, and its purpose. Some shots you don’t want to stand out, and sometimes a shot will stand out regardless of what you do, simply because of its place in the movie or what takes place.

There are a lot of good tips for this particular topic that you can find in any of your animation books. In books like the Illusion of Life you can find lots of tips on how to get the viewer to react, and how to come up with believable acting. But in an effort to provide something new, and being more of a cartoony guy myself, here are some additional things of my own.

Keep in mind that if you employ all of these it will probably be too much.

• THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO IS FORGET ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW TO BE RIGHT OR WRONG ABOUT ANIMATION. Keep in mind that you have to know the rules to break the rules.


• Caricature to the extreme -- i.e. if a person jumps when startled, hold them in the air for an impossible amount of time. If they scream the jaw might drop to the floor.


• Push. Shapes, lines of action, poses, facial expression, timing, breakdowns, contrast. Go further than what we are used to seeing.


• Animate to sound effects in your head - sounds crazy I know. For example, if you are animating a character stretching and in your head you hear the stretching of a rubber band, how does that affect your performance?


• The Simile. Use a simile quite literally to define a performance. For example, if you were to say “when he laughs his stomach shakes like a bowl full of jelly.” Instead of just having the stomach shake up and down, I would animate it as if it was literally jelly.


• Use pop music to help define your texture in timing. I’m talkin’ about those horrible songs that you never want to admit to liking, but you find yourself singing in the shower. They are popular, because they are catchy; they are catchy because of their rhythm. Sometimes to shake things up a bit I will take a rhythm from a song I heard and throw it somewhere into my shot.


• Push your pose.


• Art as inspiration. I will often look at art and say if you had to animate to that style what would that look like. How would an animated Picasso move? If emotionally my character felt broken apart, that's exactly what I might try to do. Sleeping Beauty is a good example of art inspired animation.


• Off Model. This is a tricky thing to do, but if you do it right it can be effective. You can quite literally change the look of the character, like when Ren will sometime take on a more human facial expression. Or it can be more subtle, like when the Tramp mimics a human barking orders in Lady and The Tramp. One quite literally changes the look of the character and the other pushes the expression slightly more than you’re used to seeing.

Most of these I’ve learned by watching any Looney Tunes or Ren & Stimpy cartoon, so you should probably do that first.

Labels: Nick Bruno, shot

Posted at 10:48 AM 5 comments

Thursday, November 13, 2008

What Brings a Scene to Life

Aaron Gilman, our guest blogger for the past month, has published an article in the Animation Mentor newsletter for the Tips & Tricks column. His article “What Brings a Scene to Life” discusses how it’s a character animator's job to tap into “archetypes” when creating a performance.

First off, I want to define the word "archetype". The Greek roots are arkhe- ("first" or "original") + typos ("model", "type"). The meaning behind the word was advanced by the famous psychologist, Carl Jung. Archetypes can be defined as innate, universal prototypes for ideas, and may be used to interpret human observations of the universe. In simple terms, archetypes are stereotypes or preconceived notions of a concept that all human beings carry inside of them. Through our own collective experiences and personal observations of the universe, we build concepts and ideas for things that we carry in our psyches our entire lives.

To read the full article, click here:
http://www.animationmentor.com/newsletter/1108/feature_geek.html#aaron

Labels: Aaron Gilman

Posted at 9:30 AM 0 comments

Monday, November 10, 2008

Software Shmoftware?

I've been getting a lot of questions about software lately. What software should I use to animate with? What software will help me get a job? I only know 3D Studio Max, Animation Master, and Maya - is that enough to get into a studio? How many years of software training is necessary to work on a film?

Here's some quick answers to all of those types of questions:

- Will some amount of software knowledge help you get a job? Possibly. It sure won't hurt. But is it 100% necessary? Depends on the studio. Some studios won't care at all, some will care a tiny bit, and a few will care a lot. My advice is to research the companies you are interested in, and make sure you're prepared for whatever qualities and skills that studio is looking for. Generally speaking, the big studios won't care very much what software you are familiar with (and many of them use their own proprietary software anyway, so those studios couldn't care less), while the smaller studios may care more about specific software experience.

- Most 3D animation packages work very similarly to each other. Once you learn one, it isn't very hard to learn another. As animators, we're only really using probably 5% of the program anyway. We need to save key poses, adjust timing, and manipulate the pose - that's about it, generally speaking. Because of that, I think someone who knows XSI could learn enough about Maya to get started in a day or two, and most of the medium to larger studios have some kind of training program to cover that stuff.

- How do you keep up with so many different revisions and so many different packages? That's a great question, and the industry DOES move very fast. Because of that, it's futile to try to "keep up" with the latest and greatest software when you are an animation student. It's inevitably impossible because things change so quickly, and you end up wasting a mountain of time that could have been spent studying your animation fundamentals.

So choose one software, and stick with it. The industry standard right now seems to be Maya (though many games companies still use Max), and you can use an educational version for free. Whatever you choose to practice with, just stick with that program so you don't waste time learning a new one when you could have been busting out a whole other awesome action shot for your reel!

- Is it a good idea to lie on my resume and put software experience down that I don't really have? Uh, no. This is a pretty terrible idea, and if the studio does end up caring about your software experience, they are going to find out pretty quick that you lied, and you'll likely be let go from the job and saddled with a bad reputation. NEVER LIE ON YOUR RESUME OR REEL! Bad Bad BAD idea...

OK, hope that helps someone!

Shawn :)

Labels: shawn, software

Posted at 10:42 AM 3 comments