Taking Control of your Animation

Here’s a question that I get quite a bit in my classes: Why does my animation look bad when I take it out of stepped mode into splines for polishing?

The answer for me is relatively simple. Don’t let the computer do your animation. If you don’t like the inbetweens that your computer is giving you, don’t let it do the inbetweens! Control the arcs of your character, the way a head turns, the speed at which the arms move, how much space the body goes through.

I like to say that if your computer looks like computer animation it’s because it IS computer animation. You, the animator, haven’t put enough inbetweens or enough love in your splines (whichever method you like to animate).

Ask anyone in my personal life. I’m a control freak. I have to be in control. I’m learning, through tons of therapy, to get better but the fact still remains. This comes in handy when I’m animating. I will usually put a keyframe every 2 frames or so. Sometimes I’ll even drop one on EVERY FRAME. I trust my computer to crunch numbers extremely fast. It knows the difference between a one and a two. But, it doesn’t know anticipation. It doesn’t understand arcs. So I have to put that in there. I have to let it know that on frame 46, my head is going to do this and my left arm is going to do that.

I make sure that I put that keyframe on EVERYTHING. Not just the head or the hand, but EVERYTHING. Let me say that one more time with feeling. EVERYTHING. I do this because I do like to work in stepped mode to finesse my animation and see where the keys are. The last thing I want is to hit that magical spline button, and everything falls apart. Why is that not moving? Why IS that moving? Believe me, I’ve yelled that at the top of my lungs before. If I put a key on everything, it doesn’t do things I have no control over. It doesn’t do things I didn’t anticipate.

It does what I wanted it to do.

Silly computer. Animation’s for animators…

Guest Blogger Mike Gasaway

What Tangents in the Graph Editor Do You Typically Use-- Clamped, Splined, Linear, or Plateau?

Typically, when I start a shot I work primarily in stepped mode. This allows me to get my key poses in and hold them in place without having them loosely spline from pose to pose.

One thing I do during this phase is roughly block in my holds. I place the same pose at the beginning and end of a beat (or similar pose for ease ins/outs). It's important for me to do this, because it's misleading to let the stepped keys do the hold for you. If an animator doesn't account for that end pose, once they hit spline, that hold will disappear and that’s a big reason for splining to feel swimmy initially.

From time to time, I will select all my keys and convert them to linear. This gives me a rough sense of timing, and lets me know how fast my transitions are between major poses. I'll go back and forth between stepped and linear a few times, and when I feel I have all the information in there and my timing is working well, I’ll convert to spline.

Guest Blogger Rich Fournier

How often do you work on colleagues’ animation and what are some tips for doing so?

You can work on a colleague’s animation from time to time, and depending on the circumstances, you'll handle it differently.

Typically, it can be very frustrating to work on someone else's file. Animators have different methods and workflows that they incorporate in their process. Sometimes you will get a file and when you analyze it, it makes perfect sense to you. Other times you may be left in absolute confusion trying to decipher the animator’s thought/work process.

The former can be relatively easy to work with if their workflow closely resembles your own, so changes should go smoothly.

The latter, however, can cause you to go gray overnight and utter countless curses on the file’s creator. In this case, I will strip out everything but the key poses and maybe some breakdowns to maintain the essence of the animation and rebuild it. I find that this saves me oodles of time and countless hours on the therapist's couch.

Guest Blogger Joe Mandia