Thursday, November 12, 2009

What Is "Layered" Animation and How Does It Work? Is It Good / Better for Human Characters?

Layered animation generally refers to the idea of blocking in one part or section of the body at a time. One example would be animating the up/down of the hips in a walk first, and nailing down that timing since it's going to affect every other aspect of the walk. Once you have that, you could then do another "layer" of animation by animating the torso of the character. Maybe then you'd do the feet. Then the arms and wrists. Then the head.

All of those layers will combine to form one walk.

The trick here is to do it in such a way that the overall finished walk feels like ONE character. You want all these different "layers" of animation to come together to form one cohesive action, with the different parts of the body being driven, pushed, pulled, and rotated by the other parts of the body.

Our bodies are incredibly inter-related and connected throughout. You cannot do a big and fast arm motion without moving your shoulder, chest, head, and probably your hips and other arm.

There is nothing wrong with the layered approach, but it requires a very deep understanding of the way the body works together (something I often refer to here as "body mechanics") in order to have a finished piece of animation that feels like one cohesive body. It requires careful planning, reference, observation, and a fair amount of adjusting the different layers to work properly each other.

Personally, I use a layered approach when diving into a scene with a lot of action. If a character needs to walk a long way, climb something, and then jump down - I'll probably use the Glenn McIntosh "hide the legs" approach, which helps me not get too distracted when I'm working in a layered way. (If you haven't read my article about hiding the legs, you can read it here and then come back!)

Basically, I'll create a new layer in Maya, add the legs to it, and hide that layer. Now I've got a floating legless character. I'll grab that character by the root or whatever it is that moves the character but not the legs, and animate just that thing through the whole scene. I'll work on just that root node until the general timing is worked out as far as where that character will be, when the general up/downs will be from the footsteps, etc.

Then I'll leave the legs hidden, and pose the upper body (torso, arms, head, etc), knowing in my mind or from my thumbnails how I'll eventually want the legs to work in that pose. Remember - this is all largely planned out ahead of time, and I'll know 100%, at least in my head, what that pose is exactly going to look like when it's finished. I'm not "exploring" at this phase, I've already made most of my animation decisions and am simply inputting them into the computer.

Last, I'll turn those legs on, and the leg animation is much easier than normal now, since their movement and timing is completely dictated by the body animation whose timing I already am happy with. If the leg is about to hyperextend, then that simply means it's time to lift it up off the ground and do a step. There will obviously be a bit of back-and-forth here, touching up the timing and placement of the hips to make sure everything is just right, but overall this method has served me well for action shots.

The whole point of the method above is to block in the part of the body that will define the movements of the rest of the body (the hips and torso), as well as whatever part of the body audience will see most - you do that FIRST, in the layered approach.

For any scene where the character stays generally in one area of the frame - smaller actions, acting, etc - in those scenes I'll do a pose-to-pose approach where I'm posing out the whole body and saving a key on every possible controller on those key poses and breakdown poses.

In my opinion, the layered approach is far more difficult for newer animators, and my advice to anyone who hasn't been professionally animating for a few years already would be to stick with the pose-to-pose approach, using heavy reference, research, thumbnails, etc.

However, I will say that for more advanced students or professional animators, the layered approach is worth trying to see if it's something you connect with. Be extra vigilant, however, that the end result doesn't feel like a bunch of disconnected body parts that have been animated individually! You want one cohesive character as your end result, and don't give up until you have it!

Shawn :)

41 comments:

Reed Arneson said...

Have you ever tried the layered approach with something where the foot placement is a little less flexible? Like walking down stairs. Maybe it doesn't make any difference?

Ricardo Ayasta said...

Excellent tip Shawn! I had the wrong idea about the "layered" approach this whole time! Thanks!

Kian Edalat said...

Thanks for the tip
I have problem with doing pose to pose in Maya. it results in draging feet when later I put the in-betweens. So I just draw the poses in a paper and animate straight ahead in Maya which I dun know if it is the right way. I know that every animator has their own way but Maya might give an option to key the poses in Maya rather than paper? thanks anyway

Jason J. said...

I'm just AM student myself, but I wanted to give a tip to Kian.....

Pose to pose can be very tricky, but if you are still new to animation, I really encourage you to try it more, like Shawn said. It's one of the best ways to get started really understanding how the 12 principles of animation work. Like Shawn said, it's the best place to start.

Anyway, when you say that you get feet dragging on the ground when doing pose to pose after adding inbetweens, I'm guessing it's because you need to add more break downs. If you don't already have it, get the Animators Survival kit and check out pages 61-67 for a great explanation of the different methods, and a break down of how to effectively use pose to pose. So, I think your issue (foot dragging) is not a downfall of pose to pose or Maya, it's an incomplete use of pose to pose. Give it another try and you'll see!

Jason

smearframe said...

Thats a great tip, Shawn. Sounds intriguing and intimidating at the same time. Would be nice to see an example of a shot using this approach.

Kian Edalat said...

Hey Jason

Thanks for your comment
I’d like to clarify more of my problem.
I went through Animators Survival Kit again as you said. In The Illusion of Life, Even Ollie Johnson and Frank Thomas recommend to use both Pose to Pose and Straight Ahead together. But let me explain the pose to pose in a walk cycle in two ways. As you know there are 4 main keys for a walk. If I want to animate a walk cycle using Pose to Pose in Maya, what I would do is to make the first Key for the Contact then 2nd key for “Down”, then the next would be the “Middle” and then I go for “Up” and the last one is another Contact (Reverse legs and arms) and I can continue making poses or just do a straight ahead and it just look really good and perfect to me without any feet dragging on the ground.
The second way is bothering my mind because I saw a video tutorial from Gnomon at my friend’s house. The animator created the first pose (in this example is Contact) and his next pose was the other contact (reverse legs and arms) and then he created the other key poses like “Down”, “Middle” and “Up”. But if I go with this way it definitely results in dragging. Please check page 64 of Animator’s Survival Kit. How would you know that the character takes 5 steps to get to the second key in Maya? Well Richard filmed it and because it is paper animation so he could place the second key pose at its right place! Does that make any sense to you?
Well I hope you got me and I hope to hear from you or anybody else soon ☺
Thanks again Shawn for your tips

Happy animating everyone!

Haripal Singh said...

Mr. Kian, before jumping to the Maya you need to spend a lot of time on planning , as u said that 'How would you know that the character takes 5 steps to get to the second key in Maya' it sounds like u are too much depends upon software, if you plan it first on a paper or by shoot yourself on a cam whatever suits you that will save your precious time...........

Dino Figuera said...

Thank you very much Shawn,
I can't wait to use this tecnique,
I did not know about it and seems to be fantastic.

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