Hi Everyone,
Welcome back to my four day animation test overview, so in the last post I was basically talking about what I did in the first day of my animation, and the time I spend on planning, which is the MOST important thing :), if you are interested please go back to my previous post for details, there maybe some interesting information there.
Before I get started I forgot to mention in my last post that the animation piece was actually for a 12 second dialogue that was given to me by Oktober beforehand, and before I started even planning I have been listening to it almost everyday until in was in my blood system, by the time I finish my animation test, that 12 second line is now embedded into my memory banks forever! OK so onto day two!
The second day in my animation test I started to work on blocking, now blocking is really where the guts of the animation start to happen, for me it is also a great time to play around with the timing, I do however feel you don't really get the timing until you start splining (smoothing out the animation), but it's always important to put down the timing as early as possible, even if they are rough. When I am blocking at the start, I don't worry about what frame the key poses are to be at, at this point I am just more concerned about getting the poses right, and making sure the character is well balanced from all angles, I usually set each key pose about 10 frames apart for the time. Another thing to note, is to make sure your poses are clear for your camera shot, this is something I forgot to mention at the planning, but make sure you have your camera shot sorted before blocking anything out. If your planning was successful, you wouldn't need to think about the poses while blocking and it saves a heap of time, of course the initial planned poses will not be set in stone, little adjustments will occur as the translation from your 2D drawings to a 3D model can be different.
Once all the key poses are set, I start moving the key poses in the time frame to get a rough sense of timing, making sure to playblast as often as possible, especially working with a low end computer, or working with a really heavy scene, but if you have a meaty computer that breathes fire, or a really light scene, working without playblasting can save a bit of time, as long as you make a playblast at the end to be sure. Now it is up to you whether you want to put the 'inbetweens' as you are plotting in the key poses, or after you added in the key poses, all I know is that I always end up putting in more 'inbetweens' when I am animating a more complex scene, and less so when it's a more subtle scene, the more 'inbetweens' you add, the more you will get a sense of the flow in the animation and you gain more control over the movement, because of the luxury with computers filling in the gaps between poses, we tend to let the computer do the work, and that is a big 'no no' with 3D animation, as taught by my mentors, you are animating the character not the computer :).
So at this stage you really want to lock down the poses, if suddenly you had a great idea or the directory wants you to change something, this is the best time to change things, you can change things at a later stage, and mind you it will happen from time to time, it's going to be like climbing up a steep mountain of sharp knives, painful and the end result will not be what you hoped for, that's why it's so important to show the work to your director once you have things blocked out, and it's the best time to get criticism from people at this stage too. The next step after this is smoothing, probably the most dreaded thing for most animators, but if you blocked well and had a good plan to begin with, you will find that it can actually go "Smoothly".
So stick around for my next post as I talk about what I did in the smoothing at day 3 of my animation test.
Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit.
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