Just
what it sounds like. The goal is to arrange
all your keys in an easy to edit, easy
to read fashion.
The one draw back of straight ahead animation
is that keys tend to end up all over the
place. As time goes by and the work progresses,
the keyframes get messier and messier
to deal with. Need to shuffle a pose at
the director's request? Fine. But which
keys define that pose?
What if you did fCurve bias editing to
get that particular ease in that he liked?
Now the difficulty lies in finding the
keys and editing the fcurves again. With
popThru pose to pose, much of this is
difficulty is bypassed.
The
First Pass
Have
a look at this first pass popThru animation.
This
is where I settled on the basic poses
that I wanted for this animation. I had
my fCurves with zero inbetweening.
In Maya it's called a stepped key. In
Hash it's a held key. Most programs have
this feature. It will hold the keyframe
all the way until the next keyframe, where
it 'pops" to the new pose in one
frame. Thus the name "pop-thru animation".
There's no messy or ugly inbetweening
to deal with just yet. Right here, in
this simple popping pose test I know the
basic components of my animation right
up front. Pose and timing. I can show
this to my director and get immediate
feedback about my pose choices and my
timing. He can tell me if he likes where
things are headed or not. He can tell
me if the acting choices are what he wants
or not. Right here, in this very first
look on the computer, are the building
blocks of my entire animation, all achieved
within a few hours of work.
Look at this screen grab of the dopeSheet....
Notice
that all the control objects for my character
are keyed ALL ON THE SAME FRAME. See how
organized it is? I'm treating each keyframe
as a piece of paper. In traditional animation
for each keyframe you draw the whole character,
so I pose the whole character here.
Nice and easy to edit the keys around
if I or the director feel an action is
happening a little too slow or fast. Or
if a particular pose needs revision, I
can do it all at once and key everything.
By keeping everything very organized I
can quickly make changes without having
to re-interpret my previous work. Again,
we're looking at two main things here:
Pose and timing. Pose and timing are KING.
Every other aspect of animation is secondary
to pose and timing. No amount of follow
through or overlap or anti-twinning or
secondary action or fancy flesh simulation
and dynamic fat jiggling is going to overcome
bad poses and poor timing. With pose and
timing you convey emotion, weight, energy,
power- the very core of animation is locked
up in pose and timing.
So until we're happy with these two things,
we don't do anything else.
The
Second Pass
Now,
the first crack at my pop-thru was pretty
rough. There's a few things lacking. Like
breakdowns on transitions, and defining
the inbetween arcs. Since again I've got
a pretty well established "traditional"
brain, I can think of my breakdowns and
arcs without having to see the tweens
yet. Here's the second preview animation
with some of these things added.
Notice
there's a little more definition to the
action. The arm sweeps have some arc,
the end part where he says "Ten!
Ten commandments!" has some anticipation
and transfer breakdown keys added. Also,
I've blocked out my moving holds. I do
this by generally estimating how long
I want a movement to take. Again, I add
these new keys with just held frames with
zero inbetweening by the computer.
Already we're starting to see how things
are fleshing out very quickly.
Sidebar
on How To PopThru Your Moving Holds:
Let's
say the a character hits a pose on frame
10 and from my first pop thru I find
that I like that he hits his next pose
on frame 24.
There's 14 frames in there between these
2 poses. Now I know I want that action
where he hits pose 24 to be fairly quick-
let's say 5 frames.
So I count back 5 frames from 24 and
know that the END of my hold for the
pose on frame 10 will occur on frame
19.
(read that again slowly if you didn't
get it.)
I could just dupe the frame 10 key at
19 to get the boundary of my hold established,
and in my first pass I usually will.
But in this second pass I went a little
further. I slightly adjusted the pose,
settling into it. This is called a moving
hold. Most computer animators are familiar
with the concept of a moving hold. When
a CG character stops dead and doesn't
move, it just dies for some reason.
So we have the pose move slightly as
it's held for the duration.
So as a matter of course I add that
in my second popThru pass, so I can
get a better feel for how fast or slow
my transition moves are.
The
Third Pass: Linear is as Linear Does
Now
that I've defined my poses and timing
even more in my second popThru pass, adding
arc and transition breakdowns as well
as defining my moving holds, I'm ready
to see what the computer thinks about
it. So in my fcurve editor (graph editor
in Maya-speak) I change all my keyframes
to have a linear interpolation. This means
there's no ease in or ease out from keys,
it's just going from one to the next in
a straight fashion. Computers loves this
phase. It feels so...CG!
Here's
a look at the above animation switched
to linear....
Not
bad, but certainly not good either.
Here I can see a few things that I didn't
see in my pop-thrus. One being the transition
on "has given unto you" is
way too slow. The second being the hand
rotations are pretty ugly and the arcs
need more definition in places. There's
also a few little things about the pose
timings that I'd like to adjust, especially
in the part where he looks down at the
dropped tablet. That moving hold moves
a bit too much. So I make a note of
every thing I want to fix and I fix
it. This is a good habit to get into:
find everything wrong that you can,
note it and fix it. THEN do another
preview. The temptation is to twiddle
each thing in detail and preview every
fix as you're making it. But that can
just eat your day away waiting for preview
animations trying to fix one little
thing instead of fixing them all at
once, then previewing and working in
more detail afterwards.
3DTotal
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So
anyhow, here's a look at some of the
things I did to tighten stuff up after
seeing my first linear pass...
Fourth
Round: Hey, this looks sorta like animation!
Here's
my next pass after cleaning up some
of the junk my first linear pass revealed
to my eyes...
At
this point I've pretty well nailed the
core of my animation. I like the poses,
I like the speed of the transitions, I
like the arcs, the breakdowns. Generally
I'm ready to start loosening things up.
Remember
I mentioned earlier on that pose to
pose animation can tend to look stiff
and robotic? Well, this fourth pass
is just that: good timing, good poses,
but a little dead, a little stiff. Here's
where the rest of the '12 rules"
comes into play (or not). We need to
loosen things up a bit, to let it breathe
and live some more.
Now
lots of folks have different ways to
loosen up their work. I'll share what
seems to work for me. It helps me put
out good animation at a pretty decent
clip (which my employer appreciates,
and my kids benefit from. After all,
I gotta make a living, and being good
AND fast is a nice combo in a tough
animation market). I have some shortcuts
and
tricks that I use that may make some
animators gasp in horror. That's cool.
Whatever works for you.
Having said that, here's some things
I like to do...
