Forget About Animating the Legs

In your ebook you wrote something on “forget about animating the legs.” Can you elaborate?

Gosh, that's a tough one to fit into a blog post, but maybe I can be clearer than I was in the ebook.

Basically, the idea is to hide the legs of your character. (I create a layer for them in Maya and make that layer invisible). Then you just forget about the legs completely.

So at this point, you have a character with hips, a torso, arms, and a head. The idea is to just animate that, according to the way you've planned out the scene ahead of time, and keeping in mind what you basically will want the legs and feet to be doing once you put them in.

If you follow your planning, and get the body moving around at the correct speed, with the correct ups and downs, etc., and you just work on that until it looks right, THEN you unhide the legs.

Now the legs are super easy to animate. You just set up your first pose the way you had planned out, and then as the character moves forward, you just save a key on the planted foot one frame before the leg would have hyperextended (creating an IK pop, which you want to avoid at all costs!), and then animate it taking the step or whatever.

In other words, if the body is moving at the speed you want, it's going to dictate when you HAVE to pick up the feet and move them, right? So it's kind of removing one layer of complexity from your initial animation pass by saving the feet and legs for a second pass, and on that second pass, the feet/legs are almost a no-brainer because their timing and possibly posing is being dictated by what you've chosen to do with the body.

You'll probably have to make some small edits to the body timing here and there, but if done properly, it should work.

I know it's a weird way to approach, and as I said in the ebook, I thought it was completely insane when Glen McIntosh suggested it to me, but considering he's probably the best animator I've ever worked with, I eventually figured that I should try it, and the Yoda shot I did that way (in Episode 3, where he fights some clone troopers and throws a lightsaber into a trooper's chest) really came together quickly and it ended up being a really cool way to work.

I still only would use that method in an action-heavy scene (lots of running around, jumping, etc) or else for a many-legged character (spider-shaped characters with 4 or more legs work even better for this method!), but in those instances it's a technique that comes in really handy...

Shawn :)